Wishful 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. "If the library in the morning suggests an echo of the severe and reasonable wishful order of the world, the library at night seems to rejoice in the world's essential, joyful muddle."
Author: Alberto Manguel

4. "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

5. "Genuine love is rarely an emotional space where needs are instantly gratified. To know love we have to invest time and commitment...'dreaming that love will save us, solve all our problems or provide a steady state of bliss or security only keeps us stuck in wishful fantasy, undermining the real power of the love -- which is to transform us.' Many people want love to function like a drug, giving them an immediate and sustained high. They want to do nothing, just passively receive the good feeling."
Author: Bell Hooks

6. "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

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. "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

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

11. "God hates this wishful dreaming because it makes the dreamer proud and pretentious. Those who dream of this idealized community demand that it be fulfilled by God, by others, and by themselves. They enter the community of Christians with their demands, set up their own law, and judge one another and even God accordingly."
Author: Dietrich Bonhoeffer

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. "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

17. "A seed of hope caught a taste of moisture. Some wishful kernel buried deep, where he was loathe to acknowledge it lest it poison or choke him, began to sprout."
Author: Hugh Howey

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. "We are repeatedly left, in other words, with no further focus than ourselves, a source from which self-pity naturally flows. Each time this happens I am struck again by the permanent impassibility of the divide. Some people who have lost a husband or a wife report feeling that person's presence, receiving that person's advice. Some report actual sightings, what Freud described in "Mourning and Melancholia" as "a clinging to the object through the medium of a hallucinatory wishful psychosis." Others describe not a visible apparition but just a "very strongly felt presence."
Author: Joan Didion

24. "There's no way out," he announced with satisfaction, "and no amount of wishful dreaming will produce one. The demon won't go back in its bottle, the face-off is for ever, the embrace gets tighter and the toys cleverer with every generation, and there's no such thing for either side as enough security. Not for the main players, not for the nasty little newcomers who each year run themselves up a suitcase bomb and join the club. We get tired of believing that, because we're human. We may even con ourselves into believing the threat has gone away. It never will. Never, never, never.""So, who'll save us then, Walt?" Barley asked. "You and Nedsky?""Vanity, if anything will, which I doubt," Walter retorted. "No leader wants to go down in history as the ass who destroyed his country in an afternoon. And funk, I suppose. Most of our gallant politicians do have a narcissistic objection to suicide, thank God."
Author: John Le Carré

25. "The goblins want girls who dream so hard about being pretty their yearning leaves a palpable trail, a scent goblins can follow like sharks on a soft bloom of blood. The girls with hungry eyes who pray each night to wake up as someone else. Urgent, unkissed, wishful girls. Like Kizzy."
Author: Laini Taylor

26. "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

27. "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

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

29. "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

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

31. "We look wishfully to emergencies, to eventful, revolutionary times...and think how easy to have taken our part when the drum was rolling and the house was burning over our heads. -Ralph Waldo Emerson"
Author: Mitch Kynock

32. "It shouldn't make you sad to know you're loved, Grayson."But it did. It made him sad, and panicked, and for just a moment, wishful."
Author: Nora Roberts

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. "Kiss a frog with your eyes wide open. If he turns into a prince you won't miss the transformation, but if he doesn't, you won't be fooled by some wishful illusion in your head."
Author: Richelle E. Goodrich

38. "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

39. "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

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. "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

42. "Reading books is like your own emotional and wishful life that you could see yourself living."
Author: Sarah Johnson

43. "Religion is a system of wishful illusions together with a disavowal of reality, such as we find nowhere else but in a state of blissful hallucinatory confusion. Religion's eleventh commandment is "Thou shalt not question."
Author: Sigmund Freud

44. "Definition of failure - wishful sinking!"
Author: Stephen Richards

45. "The wise will admire you. The wishful will envy you. The weak will hate you. This is the reality for those who dare to be epic."
Author: Steve Maraboli

46. "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

47. "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

48. "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

49. "Anyway, I think Florence and I noticed each other before the local train screeched to a halt at the 110th Street station, because as I boarded it felt as though we were supposed to step into the same car, and hold onto the same moist metal bar. My wishful hunch now seems confirmed by the way she's reading her Time magazine article next to me."
Author: Zack Love

50. "I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions."
Author: Zora Neale Hurston

Wishful Quotes Pictures