The point of living, and of being an optimist, is to be foolish enough to believe the best is yet to come.
- Peter Ustinov

Autumn is a season followed by looking forward to spring.
- Doug Larson

Keep your face to the sunshine and you cannot see the shadow.

I'd like to be an Optimist..... But I doubt if it would work.

The happiest people don't necessarily have the best of everything.
They just make the best of everything.

The pessimist may be right in the long run,
but the optimist has a better time during the trip

A father had two sons, one an incurable optimist, the other a resolute pessimist. He decided to conduct an experiment. He filled a room with toys, amusements and all kinds of goodies and placed the pessimist in it. He filled another room with horse manure and placed the optimist in it. Some time later he looked in on them. The pessimistic son was standing with his hands on his hips looking at all the goodies in the room with a suspicious expression on his face. He looked in on his other son. The optimist was smiling, standing waist deep in the manure, shoveling it as fast as he could over his shoulder. "What are you up to?" the dad asked his son. "Well, dad, with all this crap in here, I figured there's go to be a pony in here someplace!!"

Take 15 golden minutes making positive affirmations:
At the beginning of each day, take 15 minutes to think about the positive actions you intend to take that day.
At the end of each day, take 15 minutes to think about what happened good that day and what new things you learned that day.

LIFE BEGINS EACH MORNING: Whether one is twenty, forty, sixty, or eighty; whether one has succeeded, failed or just muddled along - Life Begins Each Morning! Life is a day, this day. All past days are gone beyond revisiting. All days that still may come are veiled in mystery. Each new day is Life, and life begins anew with it. Each night of life is a wall between today and the past. Each morning is the open door to a new world - new vistas, new aims, new plans, new thoughts. The greatest fact in life is this, that it never is too late to start again. Biography simply overflows with inspiring examples of this truth. However discouraging your days may have been, keep this thought burning brightly in your mind Life Begins Each Morning! - L. M. Hodges

Opportunity is ever worth expecting; let your hook be ever hanging ready, the fish will be in the pool where you least imagine it to be.

Learned helplessness is the giving-up reaction, the quitting response that follows from the belief that whatever you do doesn't matter.
- Martin Seligan, author of Learned Optimism

Life inflicts the same setbacks and tragedies on the optimist as on the pessimist, but the optimist weathers them better ... The optimist bounces back from defeat, and, with his life somewhat poorer, he picks up and starts again. The pessimist gives up and falls into depression. Because of his resilience, the otimist achieves more at work, at school, and on the playing field. The optimist has better physical health and may even live longer. Americans want optimists to lead them. Even when things go well for the pessimist, he is haunted by forebodings of catastrophe. For pessimists, that is bad news. The good news is that pessimists can learn the skills of optimism and permanently improve the quality of their lives.
- Martin Seligan, author of Learned Optimism

Optimism is just a useful adjunct to wisdom. By itself it cannot provide meaning. Optimism is a tool to help the individual achieve the goals he has set for himself. It is in the choice of the goals themselves that meaning - or emptiness - resides. When learned optimism is coupled with a renewed commitment to the commons, our epidemic of depression and meaninglessness may end.
- Martin Seligan, author of Learned Optimism

I'm immortal... so far.
- Earle Robinson

When it is darkest, the stars come out.

I tell you Wellington is a bad general, the English are bad soldiers; we will settle this matter by lunch time.
- Napoleon Bonaparte

They are able because they think they are able.
- Virgil

Believe that life is worth living, and your beliefs will help create the fact.
- William James

Making the best of a bad situation or the ultimate optimist: If you fall off a building you can kick and scream all the way down or you take the opportunity to look in the windows as they go by.

The optimist thinks that this is the best of all possible worlds; the pessimist knows it.
- J. Robert Oppenheimer

What we see depends mainly on what we look for.

At the beginning of a class/course/seminar, show a glass 1/2 full of water. Ask, now is this glass 1/2 empty or 1/2 full? Shows tendancy towards pessimism or optimism. Do you tend to concentrate on what's there or what's missing? As far as class is concerned, want to encourage students not to look for what is missing during the course but how what is being presented can be used and what needs it can fill.