45 Quotes About Wishful Thinking

Knowing if your relationship is salvageable or not will let you establish a position to work from. These quotes about wishful thinking will remind you of the potential you have in the future.

“A common fallacy: to imagine a measure will be easy because we have private motives for desiring it.”

“A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn’t there. A theologian is the man who finds it.”

“Anyone who is capable of getting themselves made President should on no account be allowed to do the job.”

“Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.”

“Hope is not mere wishful thinking. It is the precursor of a new dawn that slowly, steadily and unerringly comes to the fore and eventually grows into reality’s existence.”

“I could be a millionaire if I knew how to make stuff and wasn’t afraid of electricity.”

“I have frequently said, and I will repeat again, in the manner of any well-meaning seriality, that I’m interested in mixing the ingratiation of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better.”

“I realize that after decades of positive thinking the notion of realism, of things as they are, may seem a little quaint. … When the stakes are high enough and the risks obvious, we still turn to people who can be counted on to understand those risks and prepare for worst-case scenarios.”

“I think young people really do care. They want to build their life on something that’s solid and makes sense, that’s rational, that’s not built on mythology, make-believe and wishful thinking.”

“I want to think that there are better ways of obviating murder than to resort to capital punishment, but I realise that this may be wishful thinking on my part.”

“I wish I knew why she never told me any of this. Maybe she thought I wouldn’t be able to handle it, that I was too sheltered or too innocent or something.”

“If a man could have half of his wishes, he would double his troubles.”

“If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.”

“If you have a dream of writing, that’s wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that’s the way to make your dreams come true.”

“If you look for truth, you may find comfort in the end; if you look for comfort you will not get either comfort or truth only soft soap and wishful thinking to begin, and in the end, despair.”

“I’m not saying she was lying to me, but she just acted so different before I got to know her, and if she really isn’t like what she was at the beginning, I wish she could have just said so.”

“It had been wishful thinking, plain and simple, dangerous for me to indulge in. Hope, happiness and freedom were not in my future.”

“It isn’t common sense that is paramount in this world, it’s wishful thinking.”

“It’s a glorious universe the positive thinkers have come up with, a vast, shimmering aurora borealis in which desires mingle freely with their realizations. … Dreams go out and fulfill themselves; wishes need only to be articulated.”

“I’ve found that people who look at things as they are, and not as they wish them to be, are the ones who succeed.”

“Many of us delude ourselves with the thought that if we could stand in the lot of our more fortunate neighbor, we could live better, happier and more useful lives.”

“Many of us spend half our time wishing for things we could have if we didn’t spend half our time wishing.”

“Memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.”

“No fight is harder than the struggle against the thing you want most to believe.”

“No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.”

“Other people’s ideas of us are dependent largely on what they’ve hoped for.”

“Our blindest impulses become evidence of perspicacity when they fall in with the course of events.”

“People hear what they want and expect to hear, not what is said.”

“Physical fitness can neither be achieved by wishful thinking nor outright purchase.”

“Physical processes alone will never completely explain the existence of the universe, life, and consciousness.”

“Religion is an attempt to get control over the sensory world, in which we are placed, by means of the wish-world, which we have developed inside us as a result of biological and psychological necessities. ”

“Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.”

“The age of credulity is every age the world has ever known. Men have always turned from the ascertained, which is limited and discouraging, to the dubious, which is unlimited and full of hope for everybody.”

“The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.”

“The whole iconography of ancient science is simply the fruit of wishful thinking.”

“Thea was still under the belief that public opinion could be placated; that if you clucked often enough, the hens would mistake you for one of themselves.”

“There is a sense that science and politics are incompatible. I don’t think so at all. I think it’s important that scientists take great pains to make sure that ideology and personal bias and wishful thinking do not contaminate the collection and analysis and evidence.”

“There is, happily, no limit to the faith of human nature in believing what it wants to believe.”

“There’s nothing harder to stop than somebody who wants to believe a miracle.”

“Things don’t change, but by and by our wishes change.”

“To some extent I’m guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.”

“When they wish to be top dogs and become the heartbeat of all attention, some appear to be missing grit and find themselves relentlessly out of steam.”

“Wishful thinking is one thing, and reality another.”

“You can’t cross the sea merely by standing and staring at the water. Don’t let yourself indulge in vain wishes.”

“You must go after your wish. As soon as you start to pursue a dream, your life wakes up and everything has meaning.”

There are some things in life that are difficult to achieve. Having some wishful thinking for things to come will continue to allow you to live with hope.