The article is developed in partnership with BetterHelp.
There is sometimes a gut reaction to scoff at the notion that quotes can actually change your thinking or your life. It sounds silly and almost ‘woo-woo’ to believe these types of self-care tools can make any real difference.
But let’s make a case as to how they can literally be a lifeline during tough times, an important reminder that can change the course of your day, or a new piece of wisdom that helps you make a completely different decision.
Many of us get trapped in an endless cycle of the same negative thoughts stuck in a loop in our minds. It’s hard for anything to penetrate this anxious, cynical mindset when we get caught up in it. One of the most useful techniques to overcoming a feeling of anxiousness and hopelessness is to change your state.
How Inspiring Quotes Can ‘Change Your State’
What this essentially means is to find a way to shift your state of mind, or to interrupt your anxious and negative thinking with some outside help. You can do this by putting your sneakers on and going for a long walk. Or closing your eyes and breathing in and out deeply for two minutes.
Even simply switching up activities, like stopping your work to do ten jumping-jacks, can be enough to change your state. What these have in common is that they take a battering ram and bust through the impenetrable wall of our negative thoughts. They give us a chance to stop ruminating, which opens the door to start seeing things differently.
This is what quotes can do for us, if we give them the open mind and power they require. So take a deep breath, open up your mind, and read through these 20 inspiring quotes about optimism, positivity, and hope. Which one speaks to you the loudest?
Quotes About Optimism
- “Success consists of going from failure to failure without loss of enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill
- “Be fanatically positive and militantly optimistic. If something is not to your liking, change your liking.” – Rick Steves
- “Choose to be optimistic, it feels better.” – Dalai Lama XIV
- “The optimist lives on the peninsula of infinite possibilities; the pessimist is stranded on the island of perpetual indecision.” – William Arthur Ward
- “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, it’s unlikely you will step up and take responsibility for making it so. If you assume that there’s no hope, you guarantee that there will be no hope.” – Noam Chomsky
- “One of the things I learned the hard way was that it doesn’t pay to get discouraged. Keeping busy and making optimism a way of life can restore your faith in yourself.” – Lucille Ball
- “Optimism is essential to achievement and it is also the foundation of courage and true progress.” – Nicholas M. Butler
- “Optimism can be more powerful than a battery of artillery or squadron of tanks. It can be contagious and it’s necessary to being a leader.” – General Rick Hillier
- “If you truly want to exit the comfort zone and live a life that makes you truly happy, you can start by changing your attitude and adopting an optimistic outlook on life.” – Zak Khan
- “Optimism is a strategy for making a better future. Because unless you believe that the future can be better, you are unlikely to step up and take responsibility for making it so.” – Noam Chomsky
Quotes About Hope and Positive Thinking
- “Hope will never be silent.” – Harvey Milk
- “No one has a right to sit down and feel hopeless. There is too much work to do.” – Dorothy Day
- “A single individual is enough for hope to exist. And that individual can be you.” – Pope Francis
- “Successful people maintain a positive focus in life no matter what is going on around them. They stay focused on their past successes rather than their past failures, and on the next action steps they need to take to get them closer to the fulfillment of their goals rather than all the other distractions that life presents to them.” – Jack Canfield
- “The things you think are the disasters in your life are not the disasters really. Almost anything can be turned around: out of every ditch, a path, if you can only see it.” – Hillary Mantel
- “We are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars.” – Oscar Wilde
- “You cannot have a positive life and a negative mind.” – Joyce Meyer
- “You’re going to go through tough times – that’s life. But I say, ‘Nothing happens to you, it happens for you.’ See the positive in negative events.” – Joel Osteen
- “Forget about what you might have lost but instead focus on what you have room to gain.” – Lindsey Rietzsch
- “A positive attitude adopts an optimistic view of life in which every situation, circumstance or challenge is seen as a means of creating positive results, no matter how bad it is, while a negative attitude possesses a pessimistic view of life, no matter how good it is.” – Stephen Obasun
To learn more about optimism, and how to incorporate it into your life on a more regular basis, read some of the articles available here from BetterHelp.
Photo by Andrea Piacquadio
