Wishful Thinking Quotes - Page 3

• The Life-Force is a sort of tame God. You can switch it on when you want, but it will not bother you. All the thrills of religion and none of the cost. Is the Life-Force the greatest achievement of wishful thinking the world has yet seen?

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, Achievement, Cost

  C. S. Lewis (2009). “Mere Christianity”, p.27, Harper Collins

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• I am encouraged that there's going to be much better dialogue between the federal government and the state of Arizona. I mean, I hope that's not wishful thinking.

  Jan Brewer

  Mean, Thinking, Government

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• Sanity ... had it ever been more than a convention -- a comfortable set of blinkers, an agreed mode of wishful thinking, which excluded from our view the full strangeness and malevolence of the universe we are compelled to inhabit?

  C. S. Lewis

  Thinking, Views, Sanity

  C.S. Lewis (1996). “Perelandra”, p.14, Simon and Schuster

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• ..the real world's all we've got. Believers in the supernatural claim to have special wisdom about the world. But real wisdom means knowing truth from falsehood, knowing the difference between evidence and wishful thinking. Yes, the real world is mysterious and sometimes frightening. But would the supernatural make it better? The real world has beauty, poetry, love and the joy of honest discovery. Isn't that enough?

  John Stossel

  Real, Mean, Thinking

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• To be a good trader, you need to trade with your eyes open, recognize real trends and turns, and not waste time or energy on regrets and wishful thinking.

  Alexander Elder

  Regret, Real, Eye

  Alexander Elder (2014). “The New Trading for a Living: Psychology, Discipline, Trading Tools and Systems, Risk Control, Trade Management”, p.3, John Wiley & Sons

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• I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.

  John McGahern

  Regret, Writing, Mean

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• Physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe , life , and consciousness . Religious answers are just wishful thinking and wanton fabrication cast over a bottomless pit of ignorance . To explain their occult and mystical experiences , magicians are forced to develop models beyond the scope of materialistic or religious systems .

  Peter J. Carroll

  Religious, Ignorance, Thinking

  Peter J. Carroll (1987). “Liber Null & Psychonaut: An Introduction to Chaos Magic”, p.151, Weiser Books

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• A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.

  George Eliot

  Thinking, Common, Imagine

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• A bachelor's children are always young: they're immortal children - always lisping, waddling, helpless, and with a chance of turning out good.

  George Eliot

  Children, Thinking, Chance

  George Eliot (1866). “Felix Holt: The Radical”, p.91

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• The failure wishes he could do things he could never do. He thinks little of what he can do.

  Mark Cane

  Thinking, Wish, Littles

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• Other people's ideas of us are dependent largely on what they've hoped for.

  Zelda Fitzgerald

  Thinking, Ideas, People

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• Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.

  William S. Burroughs

  Thinking, Irritation, Giving

  William S. Burroughs (2013). “The Adding Machine”, p.121, Grove/Atlantic, Inc.

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• For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility.

  Frances Moore Lappé

  Humility, Thinking, Curiosity

  "Frances Moore Lappe on Creating an Ecology of Hope". Interview with Mark Karlin, www.truth-out.org. December 26, 2011.

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• About God, I cannot accept any concept based on the authority of the Church... As long as I can remember. I have resented mass indoctrination. I cannot prove to you there is no personal God, but if I were to speak of him, I would be a liar. I do not believe in the God of theology who rewards good and punishes evil. His universe is not ruled by wishful thinking, but by immutable laws

  Albert Einstein

  Liars, Believe, Thinking

  "Einstein and the poet". Book by William Hermanns, p. 132, 1983.

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• [There] are cases where there is no dishonesty involved but where people are tricked into false results by a lack of understanding about what human beings can do to themselves in the way of being led astray by subjective effects, wishful thinking or threshold interactions. These are examples of pathological science. These are things that attracted a great deal of attention. Usually hundreds of papers have been published upon them. Sometimes they have lasted for fifteen or twenty years and then they gradually die away.

  Irving Langmuir

  Thinking, Years, People

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• You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.

  Irvine Welsh

  Thinking, World, Paranoia

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• I've always said that the 1986 [Immigration Reform and Control] Act had a fourth leg [in addition to law enforcement, increased immigration and amnesty] to its stool which was wishful thinking. And that pattern of a four-legged stool was copied in the failed attempts to enact a second and bigger general amnesty for illegal aliens in 2006, 2007, and in the current year 2013.

  Jan C. Ting

  Thinking, Years, Law

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• The atheist view is correspondingly life-affirming and life-enhancing, while at the same time never being tainted with self-delusion, wishful thinking, or the whingeing self-pity of those who feel that life owes them something.

  Richard Dawkins

  Atheist, Thinking, Self

  Richard Dawkins (2008). “The God Delusion”, p.405, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• It had been wishful thinking, plain and simple, dangerous for me to indulge in. Hope, happiness and freedom were not in my future.

  Maria V. Snyder

  Simple, Thinking, Indulge In

  Maria V. Snyder (2012). “Poison Study”, p.141, Harlequin

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• Who shot you?" For a moment he looked annoyed. "I fail to see what that's got to do with anything. Reading assures me that anyone who's ever met me would have reason to shoot me, so I must admit with all candor that I have no idea. Was it you?" "If I'd shot you I wouldn't have missed," she said. "Was that wishful thinking or are you in fact a practiced shot?" "Desire would have made up for lack of expertise.

  Anne Stuart

  Reading, Thinking, Ideas

  Anne Stuart (2015). “Anne Stuart The House of Rohan Box Set: The Wicked House of Rohan\Ruthless\Reckless\Breathless\Shameless”, p.161, MIRA

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• So Republican candidates bash Obamacare and move up in the polls. Given that public opinion remains firmly against the health care law - as it has been for years - that's not a shock. Democratic beliefs to the contrary are probably wishful thinking.

  Byron York

  Moving, Thinking, Years

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• I think it was wishful thinking of me to dream of being an NBA player. And once I made the NBA I dreamed of being an All-Star, but I never dreamed of being an MVP.

  Steve Nash

  Basketball, Dream, Stars

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• Destiny grants us our wishes, but in its own way, in order to give us something beyond our wishes.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Dream, Destiny, Order

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (2016). “Elective Affinities”, p.186, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

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• A mathematician's work is mostly a tangle of guesswork, analogy, wishful thinking and frustration, and proof, far from being the core of discovery, is more often than not a way of making sure that our minds are not playing tricks.

  Gian-Carlo Rota

  Hard Work, Science, Frustration

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• It's not "wishful" thinking.

  Rhonda Byrne

  Thinking, Law Of Attraction, Attraction

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