It has been a long year. It feels like several long years, actually, jam-packed into a few dreary months. Locked down, cooped up, hemmed in, beset by a profusion of woes, wary of illness and peeking between our fingers to see what fresh Hell comes next. 2020 hasn’t been a romp in the sun.
So, this seemed an ideal moment to return to my penchant for trenchant quotations and this time to focus on….hope.
Let’s hold our heads up, look to the brighter tomorrow and know this, too, shall pass.
“They say a person needs just three things to be truly happy in this world: someone to love, something to do, and something to hope for.”
– Tom Bodett
“Love is a springtime plant that perfumes everything with its hope, even the ruins to which it clings.”
– Gustave Flaubert
“Courage is like love; it must have hope for nourishment.”
– Napoleon Bonaparte
“Love without hope will not survive, love without faith changes nothing. Love gives power to hope and faith.”
– Toba Beta
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
– Albert Einstein
“Hope is important because it can make the present moment less difficult to bear. If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.”
– Thich Nhat Hanh
“Our human compassion binds us the one to the other – not in pity or patronizingly, but as human beings who have learnt how to turn our common suffering into hope for the future.”
– Nelson Mandela
“Hope smiles from the threshold of the year to come, whispering ‘it will be happier’…”
– Alfred Lord Tennyson
“Optimism is the faith that leads to achievement. Nothing can be done without hope and confidence.”
– Helen Keller
“We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.”
– Martin Luther King, Jr.
”It’s always something, to know you’ve done the most you could. But, don’t leave off hoping, or it’s of no use doing anything. Hope, hope to the last.”
– Charles Dickens
“Hope is the companion of power, and mother of success; for who so hopes strongly has within him the gift of miracles.”
– Samuel Smiles
“A lot of people have their big dreams and get knocked down and don’t have things go their way. And you never give up hope, and you really just hold on to it. Hard work and perseverance. You just keep getting up and getting up, and then you get that breakthrough.”
– Robert Kraft
“Darkness comes. In the middle of it, the future looks blank. The temptation to quit is huge. Don’t. You are in good company… You will argue with yourself that there is no way forward. But with God, nothing is impossible. He has more ropes and ladders and tunnels out of pits than you can conceive. Wait. Pray without ceasing. Hope.”
– John Piper
“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: you don’t give up.”
– Anne Lamott
“When you have lost hope, you have lost everything. And when you think all is lost, when all is dire and bleak, there is always hope.”
– Pittacus Lore
