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I believe any success in life is made by going into an area with a blind, furious optimism.

Optimism is the madness of insisting that all is well when we are miserable.

For happiness one needs security, but joy can spring like a flower even from the cliffs of despair.

I think optimism springs from nature. I'm a gardener. Nature has taught me about rhythm, the essence of every art. With so much that is terrible, nature gives me pleasure.

Optimism is the opium of the people.

The basis of optimism is sheer terror.

When I was a child, I felt at times that I had been born into an insane asylum, that much of human life appeared to be an insane asylum. It was bewildering.

I always had a desire to know asylum life more thoroughly - a desire to be convinced that the most helpless of God's creatures, the insane, were cared for kindly and properly.

Where there is life there is wishful thinking.

The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy.