The question I want to explore in this blog is whether life is worthy of hope and optimism. Conversely, perhaps you tend to feel that humankind’s existence is more fraught with difficulty, absurdity, despair, and deserves a skeptical and doubtful attitude. One can marshal quotations about hope and quotes about doubt to cast a favorable light on one’s predetermined conclusions. I urge you to suspend your judgment and view the following quotations about hope and skepticism with an open mind. I am of the opinion that the philosophical question of what the nature of life is is a bit hard to definitively determine. Well, here we go – a look at some very unique quotations about hope and an equal measure of apt doubt, skepticism, and pessimism quotes.
First: quotations about hope, optimism, faith, and positivity. Also, note that one can entertain the idea that the nature of the universe (and if you are a believer, The world that God made for human beings) is malleable. This is conceivable since, as I understand it, quantum physics theorizes that the nature of reality changes depending on the observer. This can be validated by considering this situation: a robber looking for money for crack breaks into your house and is surprised by you; you have a shotgun. What do you do? It is not predecided. You are the actor; you will determine with awesome power whether this person lives or dies. The situation happened to you, but you will determine, with free will, how the meeting ends.
Without further ado, some unique and compelling quotations about hope and optimism and a faithful perspective on the human condition:
“To have a great purpose to work for, a purpose larger than ourselves, is one of the secrets of making life significant; for then the meaning and worth of the individual overflow this personal borders, and survive his death.” ~ Will Durant
“As a house implies a builder, and a garment a weaver, and a door a carpenter, so does the existence of the universe imply a creator.”
“Still, I had no desire to purge religious feelings. They were bred in me; they suffused the wellsprings of my creative life. I also retained a small measure of common sense. To wit, people must belong to a tribe; they yearn to have a purpose larger than themselves. We are obliged by the deepest drives of the human spirit to make ourselves more than animated dust, and we must have a story to tell about where we came from, and why we are here.” ~ Edward O. Wilson
“My study of the history of religion has revealed that human beings are spiritual animals. Indeed, there is a case for arguing that Homo sapiens is also Homo religious. Men and women started to worship gods as soon as they became recognizably human; they created religions at the same time as they created works of art. This was not simply because they wanted to propitiate powerful forces; these early faiths expressed the wonder and mystery that seem always to have been an essential component of the human experience of this beautiful yet terrifying world. Like art, religion has been an attempt to find meaning and value in life, despite the suffering that flesh is heir to.”
“The natural condition of humanity, and even of philosophers, is hope. Great religions arise and flourish out of the need men feel to believe in their worth and destiny; and great civilizations have normally rested upon these inspiriting religions.” ~ Will Durant
“Peace comes within the souls of men when they realize their oneness with the universe.”
“The arm of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.”
“If the reader has been disturbed by these pages, it is good; let him now find in his own mental resources some basis for his faith; let him honestly formulate his own reply to this philosophy of despair. For those of us who wish to live consciously, to know the worst and praise the best, must meet all these doubts if we are to maintain any longer our pretense to the life of reason.” ~ Will Durant
“To open our eyes to the true nature of the universe has always been one of physics’ primary purposes. It’s hard to imagine more mind-stretching experiences than learning, as we have over the last century, than the reality we experience is but a glimmer of the reality that is.”
“We go on working even when some of our cherished ideals seem crushed to earth never to rise again. Why? We do not know. We can only guess. One answer is that we are driven by the biological force within us, but the necessity of earning a living, and discharging the obligations which we have gathered on the way. But that is not enough. Thousands go on working after they have secured an abundance of the good things men prize. Others keep on working, as did William Lloyd Garrison, amid the gathering gloom of apparent defeat.” ~ Charles Beard
“What immortality means to me now is that we are all parts of a whole, cells in the body of life; that the death of the part is the life of the whole; and that though as individuals we pass away, yet the whole is made forever different by what we have done and been.” ~ Will Durant
“Spirituality, which inspires activism and similarly, politics, which move the spirit – drawing from the deep-seated place of our greatest longings for freedom – give meaning to our lives.”
“I am convinced that the world is not a mere bog in which men and women trample themselves in the mire and die. Something is taking place here amid the cruelties and tragedies, and the supreme challenge to intelligence is that of making the noblest and best in our curious heritage prevail.” ~ Charles Beard
“The whole modern civilized world of thought has fallen subject to the fallacy that truth is an end in itself rather than that it is simply a means to an end. The approach to fullness of life is along the way of truth, but the path is not the destination. The enduring value of religion is in its challenge to aspiration and hope in the mind of man.” ~ Ernest M. Hopkins
“A man feels significant in proportion as he contributes, physically or mentally, to the entity of which he acknowledges himself a part.” ~ Will Durant
“My religion consists of a humble admiration of the illimitable superior spirit who reveals himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble mind.”
“I was troubled by these feelings and felt my helplessness. These seemed to be no obvious way of realizing my heart’s desire. Then came Mr. Gandhi and pointed a way which seemed to promise results, or at any rate which was a way worth trying and afforded an outlet for my pent up feeling. I plunged in, and I discovered that I had at last found what I had long sought. It was in action that I found this — action on behalf of a great cause which I held dear. Ever since then I have used all my strength in battling for this cause and the recompense I have had has strengthened me, for the reward has been a fuller life with a new meaning and purpose to it.” ~ Jawaharlal Nehru
“The effort to understand the universe is one of the very few things that lifts human life a little above the level of farce, and gives it some of the grace of tragedy.”
“Faith is to believe what we do not see; and the reward of this faith is to see what we believe.”
“My Jewish home life and religion gave me a spiritual uplift and a sense of responsibility to my subconscious better self — which I think is the God within me, the Unknowable, the Inexplicable. This makes me believe I am more than an animal, and that this life cannot be the end of our spiritual nature.” ~ Adolph S. Ochs
“Science wants to know the mechanism of the universe; religion the meaning. The two cannot be separated … The more we know about the cosmos and evolutionary biology, the more they seem inexplicable without some aspect of (intelligent) design, and that for me inspires faith.”
“Kepler and Galileo believed that with proper method, the human mind was discovering the real nature of things and gazing on God’s work.”
What follows those quotations about hope are some compelling and at times, disheartening, quotes about truth, doubt, skeptism, epistemology, and the human condition:
“If we are going to ask: ‘How do we know?’ And if we are going to cope with the tools that are at our disposal for knowing, we are going to pose an agenda of questions: 1) What does it mean to know? What is the nature of that process? 2) Can we actually know anything? Is knowledge possible? 3) What means are available to us for knowing? 4) How is the world constituted? How am I constituted so that I can know something about that world out there?”
“Reduced to a microscopic triviality by the perspective of science, the informed individual loses belief in himself and his race, and enterprises of great pith and moment, which once aroused his effort and admiration, awaken in him only skepticism and scorn. Faith and hope disappear; doubt and despair are the order of the day.” ~ Will Durant
“The religions have been the energy behind much generosity, compassion, and bravery. The story of doubt, however, has all this, too. It also has a relationship to truth that is rigorous, sober, and, when necessary, resigned—and it prizes this rigorous approach to truth above the delights of belief.”
“The nature of blind spots is that they’re invisible to us.”
“Mystery on all sides! And faith the only star in this darkness and uncertainty!”
“All history, then, all the proud record of human accumulations and discoveries, seems at times to be a futile circle, a weary tragedy in which Sisyphus man repeatedly pushes invention and labor up the high hill of civilization and culture, only to have the precarious structure again and again topple back into barbarism… through the exhaustion of the soil, or the migrations of trade, or the vandalism of invaders, or the educated sterility of the race. So much remains of Condorcet’s “indefinite perfectibility of mankind.” Indefinite indeed.” ~ Will Durant
“Better never to have learned anything than know that the universe is a battlefield of cruel forces. Better, a thousand times better, to spend one’s short life ignoring all this than to be depressed or tortured by knowledge. Our ancestors were happier than we are. The less one knows, the happier one is.” ~ Abbe Dimnet
“The Christian-style “God of love” should be particularly vulnerable to post-tsunami doubts. What kind of “love” inspired Him to wrest babies from their parents’ arms, the better to drown them in a hurry? If He so loves us that He gave his only son etc., why couldn’t he have held those tectonic plates in place at least until the kids were off the beach?” ~ Barbara Ehrenreich
“I can live with doubt and uncertainty and not knowing. I think it’s much more interesting to live not knowing than to have answers which might be wrong.”
“We should not expect the natural sciences to give us direct insight into the nature of the spirit.”
“There was something ferocious in the old faiths; the gentle gospels of Buddha and Christ were blackened by time into holy orgies of revenge; every paradise had its inferno, to which good people fervently consigned those who had succeeded too well in life, or had adopted the wrong myth.” ~ Will Durant
“Life is an offensive directed against the repetitious mechanism of the universe.” ~ Alfred North Whitehead
“Usually, in the case of opinions, what makes up our mind one way or the other is not the thing we are thinking about, but our emotions, our desires, our interests, or some authority upon which we are relying. Thus you can see that the nature of opinion is wishful thinking. It is an exercise of the will to believe.”
“I did not imitate the skeptics, who doubt only for the sake of doubting, and pretend they are always uncertain. On the contrary, my purpose was only to obtain good ground for assurance for myself, and to reject the quicksand or mud so that I might find the rock or clay.”
“As for religion, I am quite devoid of it… I have read a great deal in theology — perhaps much more than the average clergyman — but I have never discovered any reason to change my mind.” ~ H. L. Mencken D
“I can say this with a clear conscience, for He has treated me very well — in fact, with vast politeness. But I can’t help thinking of his barbaric torture of most of the rest of humanity. I simply can’t imagine revering the God of war and politics, theology, and cancer.” ~ H. L. Mencken D
“Some consider metaphysics to represent what is highest in human nature – the drive to know and understand the nature of the universe and our place in it. Others consider metaphysics, specifically speculative metaphysics about nonempirical and transcendent realities to be, more or less, bunk.”
“The beginning of wisdom is found in doubting; by doubting we come to the question, and by seeking we may come upon the truth.”
“Above all [Michel de] Montaigne recognized a universe so vast and incomprehensible that the whole idea of grasping it in a human mind seemed preposterous to him, ludicrous, comic. Each of us is but one fleeting member of one small species on a relative speck of dust, orbiting a third-rate star in a galaxy among millions of galaxies, constantly expanding into new and vast unknowns. And yet mullahs and priests and rabbis and social scientists and philosophies are claiming to have discovered the meaning of everything so perfectly that, in some cases, they even aspire to infallibility. Montaigne’s response to this is simply to laugh at it.” ~ Andrew Sullivan
“Every cosmological claim of the Bible is refuted; it’s a ridiculous image of the universe.” ~ Joseph Campbell
“If it is a mistake not to recognize that our spiritual life is as natural as our physical, it is another and probably a more common error to confuse our spiritual ideals with the actual facts of existence. If we were willing to follow our ideals as ideals — as ends which we hope to achieve — we could then perhaps be gentle with our fellow man who has other purposes. But an intense faith, if one can judge from history, often makes us stupidly literal…. ” ~ John Erskine
“It is true that we have acquired a great deal of material knowledge in recent years, but so far as knowledge of the truth itself is concerned, I cannot see that we are any nearer to it now than our less imaginative ancestors were when they cracked each others’ skulls with stone hatchets, or that we know any more than they knew of what happened to the soul that escaped in the process.” ~ Edwin Arlington Robinson
“Existentialism’s unrelenting optimistic view of man unfolds against a cosmic backdrop that is equally and unrelentingly pessimistic. Absent God, the universe is a place without meaning or purpose.” ~ Lou Marinoff
“As I study the march of the human race through the centuries and try to understand its present status, I am unable to discern any plan leading to a higher fruition here or elsewhere. Cruelty, injustice, lawlessness seem to characterize the nature and actions of man today as much (though possibly in a different form) as they did thousands of years ago. A glance at the unprecedented chaos — political, social, and economic — which prevails in the world at present, teaches us this lesson. It is but the inevitable result of our incurable inability or unwillingness to learn by experience; our lack of generosity, our lack of moral courage — all things as characteristic of the human race today as centuries ago.” ~ Ossip Gabrilowitsch
“The truth which different men think they have discovered is probably not the truth at all, and that is why it has not made us free.” ~ Carl Laemmle
“By a pessimist I do not mean one who has a realistic awareness of the evils and hardships of human life; I mean one who, unable to face those hardships with equanimity, concludes from his own weakness that all life is a worthless snare. Perhaps a good deal of this pessimism comes from thinking of ourselves as individuals — as complete and separate entities.” ~ Will Durant
“Human beings seek a prior meaning in everything as a defense against doubts about the importance of anything, including man’s existence … To affirm that there is a supreme meaning of life is to give the intellect an opportunity to escape the disquieting conclusion that nothing people do can possibly have more than slight importance.”
“There lives more faith in honest doubt — believe me — than in half the creeds.”
“Truth is after all a moving target
Hairs to split,
And pieces that don’t fit.
How can anybody be enlightened?
Truth is after all so poorly lit.”
“The insecurity the wise person must face is extraordinary. Think about not being able to say with true confidence, “I am right,” or “this divorce is the best thing for me,” or “this candidate is the one,” or, “God exists.” It is so seductive to sink back into the comfortable idea that you know something, that you are sure. Yet that is the one thing the wise person must hesitate to seize upon. So, metaphorically, the wise person is resigned to lie in bed, but never to fall asleep.”
Here is a blog about meaning in life and similar topics if you are so inclined.
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