Wishful Thinking Quotes

1. "Could it be that he felt sorry for me after all? Or that his hostile attitude was really a cover up, designed to protect me? I pondered over my wishful thinking, but when his black eyes locked on mine again, all positive thoughts had vaporized. There was no question about it; Victor detested me beyond my wildest imagining."
Author: A.B. Whelan

2. "How wonderful if something that only be existed in wishful thinking, comes and expresses themselves without being asked forcefully; but alas, i'm too immersed in the excitement until i don't realize that it's only temporarily, not forever"
Author: Aditia Rinaldi

3. "Many of us like to think of financial economics as a science, but complex events like the financial crisis suggest that this conceit may be more wishful thinking than reality."
Author: Andrew Lo

4. "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 mustadmit 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."
Author: Anne Stuart

5. "If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair."
Author: C. S. Lewis

6. "From at least the age of six, romantic longing --Sechnsucht-- has played an unusually central part of my experience. Such longing is in itself the very reverse of wishful thinking: it is more like thoughtful wishing."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "Her past anguish. How do I know that all her anguish is past? I never believed before-I though it immensely improbable- that the faithfulest soul could leap straight into perfection and peace the moment death has rattled in the throat. It would be wishful thinking with a vengeance to take up that belief now. H.was a splendid thing; a soul straight, bright, and tempered like a sword. But not a perfected saint. A sinful woman married to a sinful man; two of God's patients, not yer cured. I know there are not only tears to be dried but stains to be scoured. The sword will be made even brighter."
Author: C.S. Lewis

8. "Somebody better be dead or dying."He froze mid-step when he saw her. It might have been wishful thinking but she could've sworn his face lit up."Or just sitting there looking pretty," he finished with a heart-stopping grin."
Author: Cherrie Lynn

9. "Thomas Edison said in allseriousness: "There is no expedient to which a man will not resort to avoid the labour ofthinking"-if we bother with facts at all, we hunt like bird dogs after the facts thatbolster up what we already think-and ignore all the others! We want only the facts thatjustify our acts-the facts that fit in conveniently with our wishful thinking and justifyour preconceived prejudices!As Andre Maurois put it: "Everything that is in agreement with our personal desiresseems true. Everything that is not puts us into a rage."Is it any wonder, then, that we find it so hard to get at the answers to our problems?Wouldn't we have the same trouble trying to solve a second-grade arithmetic problem, ifwe went ahead on the assumption that two plus two equals five? Yet there are a lot ofpeople in this world who make life a hell for themselves and others by insisting that twoplus two equals five-or maybe five hundred!"
Author: Dale Carnegie

10. "This life is only a test' is a counter-productive mindset; it encourages wishful thinking toward and elusive and likely non-existent afterlife while often enabling the believer to squander this life as somehow less important."
Author: David G. McAfee

11. "Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss."
Author: Deb Caletti

12. "With the first drink comes the truth, with the second drink comes wishful thinking, and with the third drink come the lies."
Author: Douglas Coupland

13. "So it's pretty simple for me: Love when you can. Do the work that is yours to do. Be the person that is yours to be at any given time. Think to wish for what is yours at this very moment. To love. To serve. To touch. To know. Think to wish for all that is yours to have. Think to wish for all that is yours to do. And think to wish that you might be who it is that you might most fully be. Avoid wishful thinking. Avoid the traps and pitfalls of nostalgia for the past. Savor every moment as it passes. And enlist yourself in saving that which can be saved this very moment, ir order that it, too, may endure for others to enjoy."
Author: Forrest Church

14. "Hope is not wishful thinking. It's not a temperament we're born with. It is a stance toward life that we can choose...not not. The real question for me, though, is whether m hope is effective, whether it produces or is just where I hide to ease my own pain."
Author: Frances Moore Lappé

15. "My plans are still in embryo, a town on the edge of wishful thinking."
Author: Groucho Marx

16. "What you read in the newspapers, hear on the radio and see on television, is hardly even the truth as seen by experts; it is the wishful thinking of journalists, seen through filters of prejudice and ignorance."
Author: Hans Jürgen Eysenck

17. "I fantasized how no matter what happened, no one could ever come between us, call it wishful thinking, I called it a fact."
Author: Holly Hood

18. "You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia."
Author: Irvine Welsh

19. "The right-wing Tories and the conservative Whigs fought Napoleon as the Usurper and the Enemy of the Established Order; the liberal Tories and the radical Whigs fought him as the Betrayer of the Revolution and the Enslaver of Europe; they were all agreed in fighting him, and his notion that their disagreement signified national disunion was mere wishful thinking. All dictators since his time have fallen into the same trap: themselves blind to the values of liberty, they cannot conceive that people who disagree on its meaning can nevertheless unite in upholding their freedoms against patent despotism."
Author: J. Christopher Herold

20. "Wishful thinking is one thing, and reality another."
Author: Jalal Talabani

21. "The existence of life beyond Earth is an ancient human concern. Over the years, however, attempts to understand humanity's place in the cosmos through science often got hijacked by wishful thinking or fabricated tales."
Author: Jill Tarter

22. "Never act upon wishful thinking. Act without checking the facts, and chances are that you will be swept away along with the mob."
Author: Jim Rogers

23. "It is wishful thinking that an anti-extremism campaign will work when this country was founded on puritanical Islam. We have to grow out of this, like England had to grow out of the Church of England with an archbishop who could veto whatever he opposed."
Author: Karen Elliott House

24. "I just sit where I'm put, composedof stone and wishful thinking:that the deity who kills for pleasurewill also heal,that in the midst of your nightmare,the final one, a kind lionwill come with bandages in her mouthand the soft body of a woman,and lick you clean of fever, and pick your soul up gently by the nape of the neckand caress you into darkness and paradise."
Author: Louise Penny

25. "And round and round and round. Why couldn't I get past the letter? Like poison id had seeped into every image and every memory I kept of Callum, polluting them until I couldn't tell which was real and what was just wishful thinking any more. Until at last, I was forced to face the inescapable fact that, for whatever reason, Callum had written the letter."
Author: Malorie Blackman

26. "It was like a new kind of vision, seeing with eyes as keen as scalpel blades, that cut away desires and emotions and wishful thinking and left only what was fact."
Author: Marcus Sedgwick

27. "The store of fairy tales, that blue chamber where stories lie waiting to be rediscovered, holds out the promise of just those creative enchantments, not only for its own characters caught in its own plotlines; it offers magical metamorphoses to the one who opens the door, who passes on what was found there, and to those who hear what the storyteller brings. The faculty of wonder, like curiosity can make things happen; it is time for wishful thinking to have its due."
Author: Marina Warner

28. "But the resurrection without the crucifixion is empty optimism, an optimism that gives credence to Freud's notion that wishful thinking is the sum and substance of our faith. Include the crucifixion--and our role in that bloody moment--and the whole picture changes."
Author: Mark Galli

29. "Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes."
Author: Mary Martin

30. "This will not be my fate," I said firmly, confidently. "And it won't be Lillatta's and maybe not even yours, though that might be wishful thinking.""Ah, you wish it not to be my fate?" Javen said brightly. "My assumption then is that I am at last making an impression?""The impression you are making is that you make way too many assumptions," I said."
Author: Michael Puttonen

31. "The act of speaking our intentions aloud shifts them from wishful thinking into action."
Author: Michael Thomas Sunnarborg

32. "Man fails to do the works of Jesus Christ because he attempts to accomplish them from his present level of consciousness. You will never transcend your present accomplishments through sacrifice and struggle. Your present level of consciousness will only be transcended as you drop the present state and rise to a higher level. You rise to a higher level of consciousness by taking your attention away from your present limitations and placing it upon that which you desire to be. Do not attempt this in day-dreaming or wishful thinking but in a positive manner. Claim yourself to be the thing desired. I AM that; no sacrifice, no diet, no human tricks. All that is asked of you is to accept your desire. If you dare claim it, you will express it."
Author: Neville Goddard

33. "Christian legend later claimed that Peter also went to Rome and there became head of the Christian community, that is, a bishop. Both Peter and Paul, according to the Catholic version, died as martyrs in the Eternal City. Paul definitely went to Rome, and may have been martyred there. But that Peter, a very devout, timid Jewish fisherman, uneducated, and knowing little or no Greek, and no Latin, would have ended in Rome is most unlikely. Thus the whole claim of later bishops of Rome (the popes) that their authority in the Church was derived from its alleged first bishop, Saint Peter, was likely wishful thinking, if not an absolute hoax, that developed in the late second century A.D."
Author: Norman F. Cantor

34. "This is an age of superstition and wishful thinking. The sky is full of evening's empires, and every one of them is founded on sand."
Author: Paul J. McAuley

35. "Someone with a fresh mind, one not conditioned by upbringing and environment, would doubtless look at science and the powerful reductionism that it inspires as overwhelmingly the better mode of understanding the world, and would doubtless scorn religion as sentimental wishful thinking. Would not that same uncluttered mind also see the attempts to reconcile science and religion by disparaging the reduction of the complex to the simple as attempts guided by muddle-headed sentiment and intellectually dishonest emotion?"
Author: Peter Atkins

36. "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."
Author: Richard Dawkins

37. "Akhlys lunged at Percy, and for a split second he thought: Well, hey, I'm just smoke. She can't touch me, right?He imagined the Fates up in Olympus, laughing at his wishful thinking: LOL, NOOB!"
Author: Rick Riordan

38. "What are the facts? Again and again and again – what are the facts? Shun wishful thinking, ignore divine revelation, forget what "the stars foretell," avoid opinion, care not what the neighbors think, never mind the unguessable "verdict of history" – what are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

39. "Violence, naked force, has settled more issues in history than has any other factor, and the contrary opinion is wishful thinking at its worst. Breeds that forget this basic truth have always paid for it with their lives and their freedoms"
Author: Robert A. Heinlein

40. "Warren is stuck in Sunday School-level, pretheological fundamentalism. It is religious infantilism of the kind that Freud to conclude that religion is nothing more than neurotic wishful thinking and the refusal to grow up. I believe there is a good bit more to religion than that, but I'm afraid Freud was right about Warrenism. It is a pinata, made of brightly colored paper, filled with sweet candy, and too easily knocked apart."
Author: Robert M. Price

41. "I feel that we should stop wasting our time trying to please the supernatural and concentrate on improving the welfare of human beings. I think that, uh, we should use our energy and our initiative to solve our problems, and stop relying on prayer and wishful thinking. If we have faith in ourselves, we won't have to have faith in gods."
Author: Ruth Hurmence Green

42. "When our hopes for performance are not completely met, realistic optimism involves accepting what cannot now be changed, rather than condemning or second-guessing ourselves. Focusing on the successful aspects of performance (even when the success is modest) promotes positive affect, reduces self-doubt, and helps to maintain motivation (e.g., McFarland & Ross, 1982).... Nevertheless, realistic optimism does not include or imply expectations that things will improve on their own. Wishful thinking of this sort typically has no reliable supporting evidence. Instead, the opportunity-seeking component of realistic optimism motivates efforts to improve future performances on the basis of what has been learned from past performances."
Author: Sandra L. Schneider

43. "Lecter sits in his armchair with a big pad of butcher paper doing calculations. The pages are filled with the symbols both of astrophysics and particle physics. There are repeated efforts with the symbols of string theory. The few mathematicians who could follow him might say his equations begin brilliantly and then decline, doomed by wishful thinking. Dr. Lecter wants time to reverse — no longer should increasing entropy mark the direction of time. He wants increasing order to point the way"."
Author: Thomas Harris

44. "A goal without real consequences is wishful thinking. Good follow-through doesn't depend on the right intentions. It depends on the right incentives."
Author: Timothy Ferriss

45. "Rhyme is bullshit. Rhyme says that everything works out in the end. All harmony and order. When I see a rhyme in a poem, I know I'm being lied to. Go ahead, laugh! It's true—rhyme's a completely bankrupt device. It's just wishful thinking. Nostalgia."
Author: Tobias Wolff

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