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“Did not one spend the first half of one's days in dreams of happiness and the second half in regrets and terrors?”
― Émile Zola, The Joy of Life

“تشاؤمُ العقل .. تفاؤلُ الإرادة”
― Antonio Gramsci

“And as we should all know by now, anytime you predict failure you have an excellent chance of being right.”
― Jeff Lindsay, Dexter by Design

“You better watch out, or you're going to be defeated by pessimism!”
― Matthew Quick, The Silver Linings Playbook

“An egocentric pessimist is a person who thinks he hasn't changed, but that other people are behaving worse than before.”
― Idries Shah, Reflections

“However, the struggle with that sentinel is, as a rule, not so hard as it may seem from a long way off, mainly in consequence of the antagonism between the ills of the body and the ills of the mind. If we are in great bodily pain, or the pain lasts a long time, we become indifferent to other troubles; all we think about is to get well. In the same way great mental suffering makes us insensible to bodily pain; we despise it; nay, if it should outweigh the other, it distracts our thoughts, and we welcome it as a pause in mental suffering. It is this feeling that makes suicide easy; for the bodily pain that accompanies it loses all significance in the eyes of one who is tortured by an excess of mental suffering. This is especially evident in the case of those who are driven to suicide by some purely morbid and exaggerated ill-humor. No special effort to overcome their feelings is necessary, nor do such people require to be worked up in order to take the step; but as soon as the keeper into whose charge they are given leaves them for a couple of minutes, they quickly bring their life to an end.
When, in some dreadful and ghastly dream, we reach the moment of greatest horror, it awakes us; thereby banishing all the hideous shapes that were born of the night. And life is a dream: when the moment of greatest horror compels us to break it off, the same thing happens.”
― Arthur Schopenhauer, Studies in Pessimism: The Essays

“I still think sincere pessimism the unpardonable sin.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“It doesn't matter if the glass is half full or half empty. I am gonna drink it through this crazy straw.”
― Joey Comeau, A Softer World: Truth and Beauty Bombs

“For better or worse, pessimism without compromise lacks public appeal. In all, the few who have gone to the pains of arguing for a sullen appraisal of life might as well never have been born. As history confirms, people will change their minds about almost anything, from which god they worship to how they style their hair. But when it comes to existential judgments, human beings in general have a unfalteringly good opinion of themselves and their condition in this world and are steadfastly confident they are not a collection of self-conscious nothings”
― Thomas Ligotti, The Conspiracy Against the Human Race

“How can you say that so casually? You're talking about the possible death of hundreds of people, yourself included."

He gave a negligent shrug. "Wrong place, wrong time. Life sucks.”
― Shannon K. Butcher, Dark and Stormy Knights

“Optimism is denial for chumps with no life experience".
"What's pessimism?" I said.
"Religion without God.”
― Jonathan Kellerman

“Optimism was for children. Once you reached adulthood then you had to join the rest of the world as a realist - life was a bag of shit you were expected to pay for.”
― N.C. Thomas, Brand

“It is the most ambitious and driven among us who are the most sorely in need of having our reckless hopes dampened through immersive dousings in the darkness which religions have explored. This is a particular priority for secular Americans, perhaps the most anxious and disappointed people on earth, for their nation infuses them with the most extreme hopes about what they may be able to achieve in their working lives and relationships.”
― Alain de Botton, Religion for Atheists: A Non-Believer's Guide to the Uses of Religion

“Some things are hard to imagine. Can you conceive of excessive contentment, for example? Or an over pleasant evening? Too much happiness?”
― Alan Moore, Tom Strong, Book 2

“A substantial amount of research over the past decade has reinforced the idea that although internal happiness can deviate from its "resting state" in reaction to life events, it usually returns toward its baseline over time.”
― Dan Ariely

“No sense in being pessimistic. It wouldn't work anyway.”
― Cathie Linz

“Y al final dejó el horror de esta vida para entrar en el horror de la muerte.”
― Fernando Vallejo, La virgen de los sicarios

“I think it's better if you rely on the fact you belong together, instead of having to reinvent your togetherness every day. People who say right off the bat that they don't want to take risks because their relationship is going to dissolve anyway - well, you might just as well split up right away. Why wait?”
― Eva Heller, Beim nächsten Mann wird alles anders

“If there is any hell more unprincipled than our rulers, and we, the ruled, I feel curious to see it.”
― Henry David Thoreau, Slavery in Massachusetts

“My glass is not only half-empty, I'm convinced someone spit in it.”
― Judy Nichols, Sportsman's Bet

“Those might not be the very best judges of the relation of religion to happiness who, by their own account, had neither one nor the other.”
― G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

“You can do what you want. You can fly as far as you want, be as determined as you want, but sooner or later you have to ask yourself, or the person with you, ‘will there be everything we have hoped for?�� When you realise there’s so little hope left, it is like seeing an entire shadow all over the world.”
― Kyra Gregory, Secrets Clad in Light

“So desperate was Kugel for things to turn out for the best, proclaimed Professor Jove, that he couldn't stop worrying about the worst. Hope, said Professor Jove, was Solomon Kugel's greatest failing.”
― Shalom Auslander, Hope: A Tragedy