A pessimist and an optimist, so much the worse; so much the better.
Jean de La Fontaine

A pessimist is a man who thinks all women are bad. An optimist is one who hopes they are.
Chauncey Depew

A pessimist is one who makes difficulties of his opportunities and an optimist is one who makes opportunities of his difficulties.
Harry S. Truman

A pessimist sees the difficulty in every opportunity; an optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty.
Winston Churchill

A pessimist? That's a person who has been intimately acquainted with an optimist.
Elbert Hubbard

Always the eternal optimist, President Reagan instilled confidence and optimism at a time both were in short supply in our country.
Jim Ramstad

An extreme optimist is a man who believes that humanity will probably survive even if it doesn't take his advice.
John McCarthy

An optimist is a driver who thinks that empty space at the curb won't have a hydrant beside it.
Jules Renard

An optimist is a fellow who believes a housefly is looking for a way to get out.
George Jean Nathan

An optimist is a fellow who believes what's going to be will be postponed.
Kin Hubbard

An optimist is a girl who mistakes a bulge for a curve.
Ring Lardner

An optimist is a guy that has never had much experience.
Don Marquis

An optimist is a person who sees a green light everywhere, while a pessimist sees only the red stoplight... the truly wise person is colorblind.
Albert Schweitzer

An optimist is a person who starts a new diet on Thanksgiving Day.
Irv Kupcinet

An optimist is someone who gets treed by a lion but enjoys the scenery.
Walter Winchell

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

An optimist stays up until midnight to see the new year in. A pessimist stays up to make sure the old year leaves.
Bill Vaughan

Being an optimist after you've got everything you want doesn't count.
Kin Hubbard

Don't ever become a pessimist... a pessimist is correct oftener than an optimist, but an optimist has more fun, and neither can stop the march of events.
Robert A. Heinlein

He and Reagan were not at all alike, because Reagan is an optimist and Dick Nixon wasn't. Yet in some ways they were alike. Neither really liked to talk on the telephone, for instance. And, in a lot of respects, both of them were very much loners.
Lyn Nofziger