A pessimist is one who builds dungeons in the air.

You do not need to leave your room. Remain sitting at your table and listen. Do not even listen, simply wait. Do not even wait, be quite still and solitary. The world will freely offer itself to you to be unmasked, it has no choice, it will roll in ecstasy at your feet.

FRANZ KAFKA

To be conscious that we are perceiving or thinking is to be conscious of our own existence.

ARISTOTLE

To become the spectator of one's own life is to escape the suffering of life.

OSCAR WILDE

I am a camera with its shutter open, quite passive, recording, not thinking. Recording the man shaving at the window opposite and the woman in the kimono washing her hair.

CHRISTOPHER ISHERWOOD

If someone says "can't," that shows you what to do.

JOHN CAGE

Opportunity is missed by most people because it is dressed in overalls and looks like work.

THOMAS EDISON

Problems are only opportunities in work clothes.

HENRY J. KAISER

Breaks balance out. The sun don't shine on the same ol' dog's ass every day.

DARRELL ROYAL

Life is a series of inspired follies. The difficulty is to find them to do. Never lose a chance: it doesn't come every day.

GEORGE BERNARD SHAW

I am open to receive With every breath I breathe.

MICHAEL SUN

The sun! The sun! And all we can become!

THEODORE ROETHKE

We are wide-eyed in contemplating the possibility that life may exist elsewhere in the universe, but we wear blinders when contemplating the possibilities of life on earth.

NORMAN COUSINS

Many are called but few get up.

OLIVER HERFORD

There is no security in this life. There is only opportunity.

DOUGLAS MACARTHUR

A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.

FRANCIS BACON

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities; an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.

REGINALD B. MANSELL

The opportunity that God sends does not wake up him who is asleep.

SENEGALESE PROVERB

Many do with opportunities as children do at the seashore, they fill their little hands with sand, and then let the grains fall through, one by one, till all are gone.

THOMAS JONES

Observe the opportunity.

ECCLESIASTICUS (4:20)

There are joys which long to be ours. God sends ten thousand truths, which come about us like birds seeking inlet; but we are shut up to them, and so they bring us nothing, but sit and sing awhile upon the roof, and then fly away.

HENRY WARD BEECHER

When life gives you oranges, enjoy. When life gives you lemons, make lemonade.

ANONYMOUS

There's so much speculating going on that a lot of us never get around to living. Life is always walking up to us and saying, "Come on in, the living's fine," and what do we do? Back off and take its picture.

RUSSELL BAKER

Learn to listen. Opportunity could be knocking at your door very softly.

FRANK TYGER

Problems are a chance for you to do your best.

DUKE ELLINGTON

Never regard study as a duty, but as the enviable opportunity to learn to know the liberating influence of beauty in the realm of the spirit for your own personal joy and to the profit of the community to which your later work belongs.

ALBERT EINSTEIN

Watch out for emergencies. They are your big chance!

FRITZ REINER

I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.

ROBERTO ROSSELLINI

"Optimism," said Candide, "is a mania for maintaining that all is well when things are going badly."

VOLTAIRE

An optimist may see a light where there is none, but why must the pessimist always run to blow it out?

MICHEL DE SAINT-PIERRE