Quotes about outlook

A collection of quotes on the topic of outlook, world, life, other.

Quotes about outlook

George Orwell photo

“Secondly there is the fact that the intellectuals are more totalitarian in outlook than the common people. On the whole the English intelligentsia have opposed Hitler, but only at the price of accepting Stalin. Most of them are perfectly ready for dictatorial methods, secret police, systematic falsification of history etc. so long as they feel that it is on ‘our’ side.”

George Orwell (1903–1950) English author and journalist

Letter to H. J. Willmett (18 May 1944), published in The Collected Essays, Journalism, & Letters, George Orwell: As I Please, 1943-1945 (2000), edited by Sonia Orwell and Ian Angus https://books.google.com/books?id=fCRLPIbLP8IC&lpg=PA149&dq=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&pg=PA149#v=onepage&q=%22intellectuals%20are%20more%20totalitarian%20in%20outlook%22&f=false

Arthur Rubinstein photo

“Music is not a hobby, not even a passion with me; music is me. I feel what people get out of me is this outlook on life, which comes out in my music. My music is the last expression of all that.”

Arthur Rubinstein (1887–1982) Polish-American classical pianist

John Guinn (December 22, 1982) "Rubinstein Was His Music", Detroit Free Press, p. 8D.
Attributed

Seal (musician) photo
George Orwell photo
Joseph Goebbels photo

“If Germany stays united and marches to the rhythm of its revolutionary socialist outlook, it will be unbeatable. Our indestructible will to life, and the driving force of the Führer’s personality guarantee this.”

Joseph Goebbels (1897–1945) Nazi politician and Propaganda Minister

“The Winter Crisis is Over” speech on June 4, 1943 at the Berlin Sport Palace, “Überwundene Winterkrise, Rede im Berliner Sportpalast,” Der steile Aufstieg (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP., 1944), pp. 287-306.
1940s

Gregor Strasser photo
C.G. Jung photo

“Among all my patients in the second half of life—that is to say, over thirty-five—there has not been one whose problem in the last resort was not that of finding a religious outlook on life. It is safe to say that every one of them fell ill because he had lost what the living religions of every age have given their followers, and none of them has been really healed who did not regain his religious outlook.”

Chap. 11 (Psychotherapists or the Clergy), p. 229 http://books.google.com/books?id=mAsPAQAAIAAJ&q=%22Among+all+my+patients+in+the+second+half+of+life+that+is+to+say+over+thirty+five+there+has+not+been+one+whose+problem+in+the+last+resort+was+not+that+of+finding+a+religious+outlook+on+life%22&pg=PA229#v=onepage
Modern Man in Search of a Soul (1933)

Arthur Stanley Eddington photo

“The mind has an outlook which transcends the natural law by which it functions.”

Arthur Stanley Eddington (1882–1944) British astrophysicist

Science and the Unseen World (1929), V, p.56

George Orwell photo
Pope Paul VI photo
Friedrich Nietzsche photo

“He that prefers the beautiful to the useful in life will, undoubtedly, like children who prefer sweetmeats to bread, destroy his digestion and acquire a very fretful outlook on the world.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) German philosopher, poet, composer, cultural critic, and classical philologist

Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919), Maxims

Bertrand Russell photo
Napoleon I of France photo

“One can lead a nation only by helping it see a bright outlook. A leader is a dealer in hope.”

Napoleon I of France (1769–1821) French general, First Consul and later Emperor of the French

Napoleon : In His Own Words (1916)

Malcolm X photo

“The pilgrimage to Mecca, known as the Hajj, is a religious obligation that every orthodox Muslim fulfills, if able, at least once in his or her lifetime.
The Holy Quran says it, "Pilgrimage to the House [of God built by the prophet Abraham] is a duty men owe to God; those who are able, make the journey." (3:97)

Allah said: "And proclaim the pilgrimage among men; they will come to you on foot and upon each lean camel, they will come from every deep ravine" (22:27).

Every one of the thousands at the airport, about to leave for Jeddah, was dressed this way. You could be a king or a peasant and no one would know. Some powerful personages, who were discreetly pointed out to me, had on the same thing I had on. Once thus dressed, we all had begun intermittently calling out "Labbayka! (Allahumma) Labbayka!" (Here I come, O Lord!) Packed in the plane were white, black, brown, red, and yellow people, blue eyes and blond hair, and my kinky red hair -- all together, brothers! All honoring the same God, all in turn giving equal honor to each other….

That is when I first began to reappraise the "white man." It was when I first began to perceive that "white man," as commonly used, means complexion only secondarily; primarily it described attitudes and actions. In America,"white man" meant specific attitudes and actions toward the black man, and toward all other non-white men. But in the Muslim world, I had seen that men with white complexions were more genuinely brotherly than anyone else had ever been. That morning was the start of a radical alteration in my whole outlook about "white" men.”

Malcolm X (1925–1965) American human rights activist

Text of a letter written following his Hajj (1964)

Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Lyndon LaRouche photo
Shankar Dayal Sharma photo

“The democratic outlook is strengthened by such awareness of experience accumulated through history in different parts of the world.”

Shankar Dayal Sharma (1918–1999) Indian politician

Source: Umeshwar Prasad Varma Law, Legislature, and Judiciary http://books.google.co.in/books?id=yuTC2E1U3BoC&pg=PA10, Mittal Publications, 1996, p. 10.

Bertrand Russell photo
Bidhan Chandra Roy photo
Madalyn Murray O'Hair photo
Joseph Stalin photo
Karl Marx photo

“What strikes one here above all is the crudely empirical conception of profit derived from the outlook of the ordinary capitalist, which wholly contradicts the better esoteric understanding of Adam Smith.”

Karl Marx (1818–1883) German philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist and revolutionary socialist

Vol. II, Ch. X, p. 202.
(Buch II) (1893)

Bertrand Russell photo
Max Scheler photo

“Jesus’ “mysterious” affection for the sinners, which is closely related to his ever-ready militancy against the scribes and pharisees, against every kind of social respectability … contains a kind of awareness that the great transformation of life, the radical change in outlook he demands of man (in Christian parlance it is called “rebirth”) is more accessible to the sinner than to the “just.” … Jesus is deeply skeptical toward all those who can feign the good man’s blissful existence through the simple lack of strong instincts and vitality. But all this does not suffice to explain this mysterious affection. In it there is something which can scarcely be expressed and must be felt. When the noblest men are in the company of the “good”—even of the truly “good,” not only of the pharisees—they are often overcome by a sudden impetuous yearning to go to the sinners, to suffer and struggle at their side and to share their grievous, gloomy lives. This is truly no temptation by the pleasures of sin, nor a demoniacal love for its “sweetness,” nor the attraction of the forbidden or the lure of novel experiences. It is an outburst of tempestuous love and tempestuous compassion for all men who are felt as one, indeed for the universe as a whole; a love which makes it seem frightful that only some should be “good,” while the others are “bad” and reprobate. In such moments, love and a deep sense of solidarity are repelled by the thought that we alone should be “good,” together with some others. This fills us with a kind of loathing for those who can accept this privilege, and we have an urge to move away from them.”

Max Scheler (1874–1928) German philosopher

Source: Das Ressentiment im Aufbau der Moralen (1912), L. Coser, trans. (1961), pp. 100-101

Jawaharlal Nehru photo

“It was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me.”

Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–1964) Indian lawyer, statesman, and writer, first Prime Minister of India

Autobiography (1936; 1949; 1958)
Context: Russia apart, the theory and philosophy of Marxism lightened up many a dark corner of my mind. History came to have a new meaning for me. The Marxist interpretation threw a flood of light on it... It was the essential freedom from dogma and the scientific outlook of Marxism that appealed to me. p. 362-363

Jawaharlal Nehru photo
Brandon Mull photo
Gillian Flynn photo
Brandon Mull photo

“Can you see the power emotion has to distort our outlook? Makes you wonder, did you have a bad day, or did you make it a bad day.”

Brandon Mull (1974) American fiction writer

Source: Rise of the Evening Star

Barbara Ehrenreich photo
Antonin Scalia photo

“Robert F. Kennedy used to say, 'Some men see things as they are and ask why. Others dream things that never were and ask why not?'; that outlook has become a far too common and destructive approach to interpreting the law”

Antonin Scalia (1936–2016) former Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States

Speech at Catholic University, Columbus School of Law http://web.archive.org/web/20040704015129/http://www.law.cua.edu/News/Things%20That%20Never%20Were.cfm (2004).
2000s

Brian W. Aldiss photo

“If you think with your emotions, slight glandular changes are sufficient to revise your entire outlook.”

Brian W. Aldiss (1925–2017) British science fiction author

“Basis for Negotiations” p. 124
Short fiction, Who Can Replace a Man? (1965)

Ahad Ha'am photo
Arthur Stanley Eddington photo
John Zerzan photo
Perry Anderson photo

“The longwall method [can be] regarded as a technological system expressive of the prevailing outlook of mass-production engineering and as a social structure consisting of the occupational roles that have been institutionalized in its use.”

Eric Trist (1909–1993) British scientist

Source: "Some Social and Psychological Consequences of the Long Wall Method of Coal-Getting", 1951, p. 5

Hillary Clinton photo

“We should remember that just as a positive outlook on life can promote good health, so can everyday acts of kindness.”

Hillary Clinton (1947) American politician, senator, Secretary of State, First Lady

It Takes A Village, January 1996
White House years (1993–2000)

Frederick Douglass photo

“It was once said by Abraham Lincoln that this Republic could not long endure half slave and half free; and the same may be said with even more truth of the black citizens of this country. They cannot remain half slave and half free. They must be one thing or the other. And this brings me to consider the alternative now presented between slavery and freedom in this country. From my outlook, I am free to affirm that I see nothing for the negro of the South but a condition of absolute freedom, or of absolute slavery. I see no half-way place for him. One or the other of these conditions is to solve the so-called negro problem. There are forces at work in both of these directions, and for the present that which aims at the re-enslavement of the negro seems to have the advantage. Let it be remembered that the labor of the negro is his only capital. Take this from him, and he dies from starvation. The present mode of obtaining his labor in the South gives the old master-class a complete mastery over him. I showed this in my last annual celebration address, and I need not go into it here. The payment of the negro by orders on stores, where the storekeeper controls price, quality, and quantity, and is subject to no competition, so that the negro must buy there and nowhere else–an arrangement by which the negro never has a dollar to lay by, and can be kept in debt to his employer, year in and year out–puts him completely at the mercy of the old master-class. He who could say to the negro, when a slave, you shall work for me or be whipped to death, can now say to him with equal emphasis, you shall work for me, or I will starve you to death… This is the plain, matter-of-fact, and unexaggerated condition of the plantation negro in the Southern States today.”

Frederick Douglass (1818–1895) American social reformer, orator, writer and statesman

Speech http://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-nations-problem/

“Muslims had two more advantages in addition to their aggressiveness and superiority in the art of warfare. “During this long period of Indian resistance”, observes Dr. Misra, “the infiltration of Arabs, and later on the Turks, continued almost unabated into India, both through armed invasions as well as through peaceful migration from Central Asia. The Hindus, true to their catholicity of religious outlook and rich tradition of tolerance, never obstructed the peaceful immigrants and even zealously granted them security and full religious freedom… The greatest Chishti saint of India, Shaikh Muinuddin Chishti, came to Ajmer just before the battles of Tarain and was able to attract a number of devoted followers… It is all the more remarkable that this Hindu tolerance towards the Muslim merchants and mystics should have continued even after the invasions of Sultan Mahmud of Ghazni… As Professor Habib points out, ‘the far-flung campaigns of Sultan Mahmud would have been impossible without an accurate knowledge of trade routes and local resources, which was probably obtained from Muslim merchants.’ The same can be said to hold good about the invasions of Muhammad Ghori or Qutbuddin Aibak.””

Ram Gopal (1925) Indian author and historian

The sufis were working not only as the spies of Islamic imperialism but also as deceivers of gullible Hindu masses.
Quoted from S.R. Goel, (1994) Heroic Hindu resistance to Muslim invaders, 636 AD to 1206 AD.
Indian Resistance to Early Muslim Invaders Upto 1206 A.D.

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Mao Zedong photo

“Many leaders are in the first instance executives whose primary duty is to direct some enterprise or one of its departments or sub-units…
It remains true that in every leadership situation the leader has to possess enough grasp of the ways and means, the technology and processes by means of which the purposes are being realized, to give wise guidance to the directive effort as a whole…
In general the principle underlying success at the coordinative task has been found to be that every special and different point of view in the group affected by the major executive decisions should be fully represented by its own exponents when decisions are being reached. These special points of view are inevitably created by the differing outlooks which different jobs or functions inevitably foster. The more the leader can know at first hand about the technique employed by all his group, the wiser will be his grasp of all his problems…
But more and more the key to leadership lies in other directions. It lies in ability to make a team out of a group of individual workers, to foster a team spirit, to bring their efforts together into a unified total result, to make them see the significance of the particular task each one is doing in relation to the whole.”

Ordway Tead (1891–1973) American academic

Source: The art of leadership (1935), p. 115; as cited in: William Sykes " Visions Of Hope: Leadership http://www.openwriting.com/archives/2012/08/leadership_2.php." Published on August 12, 2012.

Amrita Sher-Gil photo

“The Brahmacharis as the most difficult thing she had ever done…. don't you think I have learnt something from Indian painting?…I don't know whether it is a passing phase or a durable change in my outlook but I see in a more detached manner, more ironically than I have ever done.”

Amrita Sher-Gil (1913–1941) Hungarian Indian artist

In a latter to Karl Khandalavala in 1937 after she had done three paintings on south Indian villagers - The Bride's Toilet, The Brahmacharis, and South Indian Villagers going to Market.
Sikh Heritage,Amrita Shergil

Chris Cornell photo

“I remember seeing how Layne [Staley] reacted to Andy [Andrew Wood] dying from drugs, and I think that he was scared possibly. And I think he also reacted the same way when Kurt [Cobain] shot himself. They were really good friends. And yet it didn’t stop him. But for me, if I think about the evolution of my life as it appears in songs for example, Higher Truth is a great example of a record I wouldn’t have been able to write [when I was younger], and part of that is in essence because there was a period of time there where I didn’t expect to be here. And now not only do I expect to be here, and I’m not going anywhere, but I’ve had the last 12 years of my life being free of substances to kind of figure out who the substance-free guy is, because he’s a different guy. Just by brain chemistry, it can’t be avoided. I’m not the same, I don’t think the same, I don’t react the same. And my outlook isn’t necessarily the same. My creative endeavours aren’t necessarily the same. And one of the great things about that is it enabled me to kind of keep going artistically and find new places and shine the light into new corners where I hadn’t really gone before. And that feels really good. But it’s also bittersweet because I can’t help but think, what would Jeff be doing right now, what would Kurt be doing right now, what would Andy be doing? Something amazing, I’m sure of it. And it would be some music that would challenge me to lift myself up, something that would be continually raising the bar so that I would work harder too, in the same way they affected me when they were alive basically.”

Chris Cornell (1964–2017) American singer-songwriter, musician

When asked if there was a lesson to be learned from his friends' deaths caused by substance abuse and if it was not enough to scare everyone ** The Life & Times of Chris Cornell, Rolling Stone Australia, 17 September 2015 https://rollingstoneaus.com/music/post/the-life-and-times-of-chris-cornell/2273,
Solo career Era

Peter D. Schiff photo
Nikolai Berdyaev photo
George Klir photo
Neil deGrasse Tyson photo
Jan Smuts photo

“… I fail to believe that Hitler's war – the most terrible in history – was merely due to economic causes, and not to something deeper and more sinister in human outlook and beliefs. … It was an ideology and not merely materialism. It was an ideological obsession, a madness, which can operate as disastrously in nations as in individuals. …”

Jan Smuts (1870–1950) military leader, politician and statesman from South Africa

Addressing the Canada Club in Ottawa on 29 June 1945, after the United Nations Charter was finalized, as quoted by Louise W. Holborn (ed., 1948) in War and Peace Aims of the United Nations, p. 719

Lytton Strachey photo
Robert Baden-Powell photo
Howard Scott photo
Heinrich Robert Zimmer photo
Stanley Baldwin photo
Kurt Schwitters photo
Mark Satin photo
Jack London photo
Viktor Schauberger photo

“Money and generous benefits can easily alter a person’s political outlook. Ideology follows the money.”

L. K. Samuels (1951) American writer

Source: In Defense of Chaos: The Chaology of Politics, Economics and Human Action, (2013), p. 301

Paul Karl Feyerabend photo
Alfred P. Sloan photo

“It was not, however, a matter of interest to me only with respect to my divisions, since as a member of the Executive Committee, I was a kind of general executive and so had begun to think from the corporate viewpoint. The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed — plus or minus — by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment. This was one of the difficulties with the expansion program of that time. It was natural for the divisions to compete for investment funds, but it was irrational for the general officers of the corporation not to know where to place the money to best advantage. In the absence of objectivity it was not surprising that there was a lack of real agreement among the general officers. Furthermore, some of them had no broad outlook, and used their membership on the Executive Committee mainly to advance the interests of their respective divisions.
The important thing was that no one knew how much was being contributed—plus or minus—by each division to the common good of the corporation. And since, therefore, no one knew, or could prove, where the efficiencies and inefficiencies lay, there was no objective basis for the allocation of new investment.”

Alfred P. Sloan (1875–1966) American businessman

Source: My Years with General Motors, 1963, p. 48-49

“An odd outlook on life is the beginning of good comedic writing.”

Phil Vischer (1966) American puppeter

Interview article at InfuzeMag.com http://www.infuzemag.com/interviews/archives/2004/03/phil_vischer_in.html

Éric Pichet photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
K. R. Narayanan photo
Bill Nye photo

“I went to Monsanto, and I spent a lot of time with the scientists there, and I have revised my outlook, and I'm very excited about telling the world. When you’re in love, you want to tell the world.”

Bill Nye (1955) American science educator, comedian, television host, actor, writer, scientist and former mechanical engineer

[The Washington Post, http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/energy-environment/wp/2015/03/03/proof-hes-the-science-guy-bill-nye-is-changing-his-mind-about-gmos/, October 15, 2015, Proof he’s the Science Guy: Bill Nye is changing his mind about GMOs, Puneet, Kollipara, March 3, 2015]

Alexandra Kollontai photo
Gordon B. Hinckley photo

“There is nothing that dulls a personality so much as a negative outlook.”

Gordon B. Hinckley (1910–2008) President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

Whosoever Will Save His Life, Tambuli, Feb 1983, 1.

David Lloyd George photo

“Do these things for the sake of your country during the war. Do them for the sake of your country after the war. When the smoke of this great conflict has been dissolved in the atmosphere we breathe there will reappear a new Britain. It will be the old country still, but it will be a new country. Its commerce will be new, its trade will be new, its industries will be new. There will be new conditions of life and of toil, for capital and for labour alike, and there will be new relations between both of them and for ever. (Cheers.) But there will be new ideas, there will be a new outlook, there will be a new character in the land. The men and women of this country will be burnt into fine building material for the new Britain in the fiery kilns of the war. It will not merely be the millions of men who, please God! will come back from the battlefield to enjoy the victory which they have won by their bravery—a finer foundation I would not want for the new country, but it will not be merely that—the Britain that is to be will depend also upon what will be done now by the many more millions who remain at home. There are rare epochs in the history of the world when in a few raging years the character, the destiny, of the whole race is determined for unknown ages. This is one. The winter wheat is being sown. It is better, it is surer, it is more bountiful in its harvest than when it is sown in the soft spring time. There are many storms to pass through, there are many frosts to endure, before the land brings forth its green promise. But let us not be weary in well-doing, for in due season we shall reap if we faint not.”

David Lloyd George (1863–1945) Former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom

Loud cheers.
Speech in his constituency of Carnavon Boroughs (3 February 1917), quoted in The Times (5 February 1917), p. 12
Prime Minister

Pope Benedict XVI photo
Leszek Kolakowski photo
Robert D. Kaplan photo
Harry Truman photo
Roy Jenkins photo

“My outlook is that life is like a self-service restaurant and you have to help yourself. Sometimes when you see what the other fella has got, you want some of it too.”

Max Bygraves (1922–2012) Singer, comedian, actor

On being unfaithful to his wife; Daily Mail 24th May 2011

Paul Kurtz photo
Kwame Nkrumah photo

“I was introduced to the great philosophical systems of the past to which the Western universities have given their blessing, arranging and classifying them with the delicate care lavished on museum pieces. When once these systems were so handled, it was natural that they should be regarded as monuments of human intellection. And monuments, because they mark achievements at their particular point in history, soon become conservative in the impression which they make on posterity. I was introduced to Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Marx and other immortals, to whom I should like to refer as the university philosophers. But these titans were expounded in such a way that a student from a colony could easily find his breast agitated by Conflicting attitudes. These attitudes can have effects which spread out over a whole society, should such a student finally pursue a political life. A colonial student does not by origin belong to the intellectual history in which the university philosophers are such impressive landmarks. The colonial student can be so seduced by these attempts to give a philosophical account of the universe, that surrenders his whole personality to them. When he does this, he loses sight of the fundamental social fact that he is a colonial subject. In this way, he omits to draw from his education and from the concern displayed by the great philosophers for human problems, anything which he might relate to the very real problem of colonial domination, which, as it happens, conditions the immediate life of every colonized African. With single-minded devotion, the colonial student meanders through the intricacies of the philosophical systems. And yet these systems did aim at providing a philosophical account ofthe world in the circumstances and conditions of their time. For even philosophical systems are facts of history. By the time, however, that they come to be accepted in the universities for exposition, they have lost the vital power which they had at their first statement, they have shed their dynamism and polemic reference. This is a result of the academic treatment which they are given. The academic treatment is the result of an attitude to philosophical systems as though there was nothing to them hut statements standing in logical relation to one another. This defective approach to scholarship was suffered hy different categories of colonial student. Many of them had heen handpicked and, so to say, carried certificates ofworthiness with them. These were considered fit to become enlightened servants of the colonial administration. The process by which this category of student became fit usually started at an early age, for not infrequently they had lost contact early in life with their traditional background. By reason of their lack of contact with their own roots, they became prone to accept some theory of universalism, provided it was expressed in vague, mellifluous terms. Armed with their universalism, they carried away from their university courses an attitude entirely at variance with the concrete reality of their people and their struggle. When they came across doctrines of a combative nature, like those of Marxism, they reduced them to arid abstractions, to common-room subtleties. In this way, through the good graces oftheir colonialist patrons, these students, now competent in the art of forming not a concrete environmental view of social political problems, but an abstract, 'liberal' outlook, began to fulfil the hopes and expectations oftheir guides and guardians.”

Kwame Nkrumah (1909–1972) Pan Africanist and First Prime Minister and President of Ghana

Source: Consciencism (1964), Introduction, pp. 2-4.

Quentin Crisp photo

“The very concept of repentance and atonement has made the Jewish outlook on life one of cheerfulness and confidence.”

Philip Birnbaum (1904–1988) American translator and writer

Festival Prayer Book: Yom Kippur (1960) p.IX

Max Beckmann photo
Perry Anderson photo
K. R. Narayanan photo