From Denny: OK, how many of you grew up with pessimists like I did in the family, at school and in the workplace? They can be real downers. Now, I'm not talking about the realists or the pragmatists; I'm talking about the "woe is me" everything-is-impossible kind of guy who just wears you out with their negativity.
So, what to do when you feel like you are going to fall into their dark abyss and want to keep your balance around these kinds of people? Easy. First you hike on over here to Dennys Funny Quotes (yay! shameless self-promotion!) and get yourself a laugh or two to fortify you for the day and then you chill out and find all this silly negativity amusing like I do. I mean, really, some of these folks need to go get an attitude adjustment. Hey, if meds does it - then stock up, please. Some of these quotes are delightfully cheeky, enjoy!
Quotes
* I know that there are people who do not love their fellow man, and I hate people like that! - Tom Lehrer
* Everything human is pathetic. The secret source of humor itself is not joy but sorrow. There is no humor in heaven. - Mark Twain
* The optimist sees the rose and not its thorns; the pessimist stares at the thorns, oblivious to the rose. ~ Kahlil Gabran
* An optimist will tell you the glass is half-full; the pessimist, half-empty; and the engineer will tell you the glass is twice the size it needs to be. - Unknown
* Pessimist: One who, when he has the choice of two evils, chooses both. ~ Oscar Wilde
* I had a lover's quarrel with the world. ~ Robert Frost, The Lesson for Today, 1942
* It's just life - wake up and smell the thorns. ~ From the movie Meet Joe Black
* Paradoxical as it sounds, many intellectuals prefer life in the mud to life in clear water. ~ Martin H. Fischer
* The better I get to know men, the more I find myself loving dogs. ~ Charles de Gaulle
* Oftentimes, when people are miserable, they will want to make other people miserable, too. But it never helps. ~ Lemony Snicket
* Nowadays most men lead lives of noisy desperation. ~ James Thurber, Further Fables for Our Time, 1956
* God made everything out of nothing. But the nothingness shows through. ~ Paul Valéry, Mauvaises pensées et autres, 1942
* How I wish that somewhere there existed an island for those who are wise and of good will. ~ Albert Einstein
* A satirist is a man who discovers unpleasant things about himself and then says them about other people. ~ Peter McArthur
* There is nothing so pitiful as a young cynic because he has gone from knowing nothing to believing nothing. ~ Maya Angelou, PBS, 28 March 1988
* I grieve for life's bright promise, just shown and then withdrawn. ~ William Cullen Bryant
* Perhaps if we saw what was ahead of us, and glimpsed the crimes, follies, and misfortunes that would befall us later on, we would all stay in our mother's wombs, and then there would be nobody in the world but a great number of very fat, very irritated women. ~ Lemony Snicket
* Nine-tenths of the people were created so you would want to be with the other tenth. ~ Horace Walpole
* Man is the cruelest animal. At tragedies, bullfights, and crucifixions he has so far felt best on earth; and when he invented hell for himself, behold, that was his very heaven. ~ Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spake Zarathustra, 1892
* I never knew whether to pity or congratulate a man on coming to his senses. ~ William Makepeace Thackeray
Photo by Tambako the Jaguar @ flickr - Creative Commons with attribution
* All our lives we are putting pennies - our most golden pennies - into penny-in-the-slot machines that are almost always empty. ~ Logan Pearsall Smith
* The enthusiastic, to those who are not, are always something of a trial. ~ Alban Goodier
* If there be a hell upon earth, it is to be found in a melancholy man's heart. ~ Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy
* Many of us go through life feeling as an actor might feel who does not like his part, and does not believe in the play. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
* The mad are happy, the sane ignorant; those of us stuck on the sane side of madness or the mad fringe of sanity are in a purgatorial cage. ~ Anonymous
* I do not believe in revealed religion - I will have nothing to do with your immortality; we are miserable enough in this life, without speculating on another. ~ Lord Byron, 1778-1824, letter to Rev. Francis Hodgson, 1811
* The only thing that could spoil a day was people. People were always the limiters of happiness except for the very few that were as good as spring itself. ~ Ernest Hemingway
* Idealism is what precedes experience; cynicism is what follows. ~ David T. Wolf
* My mind's terrain has become exceedingly rough. Emotional scars are changing my internal geography faster than the mapmaker can keep pace. Wrong turns and dead ends abound, and I'm afraid someday I'll drown in a river I didn't know was there. ~ D.H. Mondfleur
* It must be admitted that there are some parts of the soul which we must entirely paralyze before we can live happily in this world. ~ Sébastien-Roch Nicolas de Chamfort
* Happy endings are only stories that haven't finished yet. ~ Simon Kinberg, Mr. & Mrs. Smith
* Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old Age: a regret. ~ Benjamin Disraeli, Coningsby
* You're obliged to pretend respect for people and institutions you think absurd. You live attached in a cowardly fashion to moral and social conventions you despise, condemn, and know lack all foundation. It is that permanent contradiction between your ideas and desires and all the dead formalities and vain pretenses of your civilization which makes you sad, troubled and unbalanced. In that intolerable conflict you lose all joy of life and all feeling of personality, because at every moment they suppress and restrain and check the free play of your powers. That's the poisoned and mortal wound of the civilized world. ~ Octave Mirbeau, Torture Garden
* I like long walks, especially when they're taken by people who annoy me. ~ Fred Allen
* Janie's a pretty typical teenager - angry, insecure, confused. I wish I could tell her that's all going to pass, but I don't want to lie to her. ~ Alan Ball, American Beauty, 1999
* Comfort, or revelation: God owes us one of these, but surely not both. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Neurotic's Notebook, 1960
* I see it all perfectly: there are two possibilities, one can either do this or do that. My honest opinion and friendly advice is this: do it or do not do it, you will regret both. ~ Kierkegaard
* The world bruises us all, but some heal faster than others - and some bleed to death. ~ D.H. Mondfleur
* The army of wrongness rampant in the world might as well march over me. ~ Truman Capote, Breakfast at Tiffany's, 1958
* The dignity of man lies in his ability to face reality in all its meaninglessness. ~ Martin Esslin
Photo of Cocoa the dachsund by nao-cha @ flickr - Creative Commons with attribution, no commercial use
* We are adhering to life now with our last muscle - the heart. ~ Djuna Barnes
* He had an astringent spirit, the sort of fellow who uses dehydrated onion when the recipe calls for fresh, not because he's out but solely on principle. ~ Emme Woodhull-Bäche
* Sometimes you wake up in the morning and wish your parents had never met. ~ Bill Fitch
* Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know. ~ Ernest Hemingway
* We semaphore from ship to ship, but they're sinking, too. ~ Mignon McLaughlin, The Second Neurotic's Notebook, 1966
* He had the uneasy manner of a man who is not among his own kind, and who has not seen enough of the world to feel that all people are in some sense his own kind. ~ Willa Cather
* I advise you to go on living solely to enrage those who are paying your annuities. It is the only pleasure I have left. ~ Voltaire
* Things are not as bad as they seem. They are worse. ~ Bill Press
Men hate to be misunderstood, and to be understood makes them furious. ~ Edgar Saltus
* We can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as effectively as by bombs. ~ Kenneth Clark
* * * (Love the irony in this one) The Bible tells us to love our neighbors, and also to love our enemies; probably because they are generally the same people. ~ G.K. Chesterton
* I hate to be near the sea, and to hear it raging and roaring like a wild beast in its den. It puts me in mind of the everlasting efforts of the human mind, struggling to be free and ending just where it began. ~ William Hazlitt
* Oh, that this too too solid flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into a dew. ~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet
* Nothing is more miserable than man, Of all upon the earth that breathes and creeps. ~ Homer, Iliad
* The power of accurate observation is commonly called cynicism by those who have not got it. ~ George Bernard Shaw
* Why is it that we rejoice at a birth and grieve at a funeral? Is it because we are not the person involved? ~ Mark Twain, Pudd'nhead Wilson, 1894
* Of the demonstrably wise there are but two: those who commit suicide, and those who keep their reasoning faculties atrophied by drink. ~ Mark Twain, Note-Book, 1935
* Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own. ~ Jonathan Swift, The Battle of the Books, 1704
* Life is one long process of getting tired. ~ Samuel Butler
When we are born, we cry that we are come to this great stage of fools. ~ William Shakespeare, King Lear
* I put the question directly to myself: "Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?" And an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, "No!" ~John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, 1909
I've always been interested in people, but I've never liked them. ~ W. Somerset Maugham
* A cynic knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. ~ Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere's Fan, 1893
* There is no such thing as inner peace. There is only nervousness and death. ~ Fran Lebowitz
These silly quotes are a total scream!
* Sarcasm is the sour cream of wit. ~ Anonymous
* A cynic is a person searching for an honest man, with a stolen lantern. ~ Edgar A. Shoaff
* There are people who have an appetite for grief; pleasure is not strong enough and they crave pain. They have mithridatic stomachs which must be fed on poisoned bread, natures so doomed that no prosperity can sooth their ragged and dishevelled desolation. ~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
* I love mankind - its people I can't stand. ~ Charles M. Schulz, Go Fly a Kite, Charlie Brown
* I don't answer the phone. I get the feeling whenever I do that there will be someone on the other end. ~ Fred Couples
* It is not a fragrant world. ~ Raymond Chandler
*** ALSO for more laughs:
Roundup of Late Night Funnies 1 Feb 2010
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