The realist sees reality as concrete. The optimist sees reality as clay.
An optimist is someone who figures that if it walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's the bluebird of happiness.
After 5,000 years of recorded human history, you wonder, what part of 2,000,000 sunrises doesn't a pessimist understand?
How do you tell an optimist that he or she has lived a happy life by mistake?
It can be said of optimism that while sometimes mistaken, it is never sadly mistaken.
It's still possible to be a cockeyed optimist these days - you just have to be a little more cockeyed.
The average pencil is seven inches long, with just a half-inch eraser - in case you thought optimism was dead In fact maybe there is a lesson there for how we should approach the future...with fourteen parts optimism - anticipating what could go right and the benefits - and one part pessimism - anticipating what could go wrong so we can avoid them.