2 corinthians on Optimism

Jim Collins, the author of Good to Great , interviewed Admiral Jim Stockdale, the highest-ranking officer in the Hanoi Hilton prisoner of war camp during the height of the Vietnam War. Regarding the ...

It takes no courage to be an optimist, but it takes a great deal of courage to have hope.

Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

Hope is the power of being cheerful in the presence of circumstances we know to be desperate.

Hope means hoping when things are hopeless, or it is no virtue at all... As long as matters are really hopeful, hope is mere flattery or platitude; it is only when everything is hopeless that hope beg...

Hope is a renewable option: If you run out of it at the end of the day, you get to start over in the morning.

Because of this we have hope: Two men look out through the same bars One sees mud, one sees stars.

We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. A continual looking forward to the eternal world is not as some modern people think, a form of escapism or wishful thinking. But it's one of the great thing...

Hope sees the invisible, feels the intangible, and achieves the impossible.

Hope is the physician of each misery.

The solid facts about the future hope of Christians are a powerful motivation for constant faith and costly love in the present.

Survival requires more than the basic biological necessities we readily acknowledge—oxygen, food, and water. It also demands something less tangible but equally vital: hope. When hope vanishes, the hu...

Let us drink to the success of our hopeless cause.

Hope orients all thought, action, and relationships to God’s ultimate redemption of the creation and to the ultimate communion with the triune God...hope is the steady orientation to God’s making all ...

Having hope is hard; harder when you get older.

Discouraged not by difficulties without, or the anguish of ages within, the heart listens to a secret voice that whispers: "Be not dismayed; in the future lies the Promised Land.

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

People by nature build, tear down, and rebuild. We build our hopes, get disappointed, and then search for renewed hope.

It is no stretch to say that the Lord may orchestrate amazingly challenging circumstances for you and your family for the primary purpose of giving your supernatural hope and Christian contentment a p...

[The Christian Faith] has its roots in the future and its branches in the present.

In faith there is enough light for those who want to believe and enough shadows to blind those who don't.

Preaching Commentary Besieged from All Angles The context of this passage is best summed up with the words recorded throughout the letter: Trouble, Distress, Suffering, Hardship, Death at work, Jar...

Faith makes all things possible. Love makes all things easy.

Major Harold Kushner was a prisoner of the Viet Cong for more than five years. Kushner describes one of his fellow American prisoners, a tough twenty-four-year-old Marine who had made a deal with thei...

Faith is dead to doubts— dumb to discouragements, blind to impossibilities, knows nothing but success. Faith lifts its hand up through the threatening clouds, lays hold of Him who has all power in hea...

Hope remains possible even amid our failures—whether we disappoint God, let down our families, or fall short of our own expectations—because divine compassion operates like an inexhaustible well. Each...

If you let your circumstances define the way you see God, you are a prisoner of perspective. Or worse, a prisoner of your past mistakes! But if you let God define the way you see your circumstances, y...

One sees great things from the valley; only small things from the peak.

In this excerpt from his book Faith in the Shadows, pastor and author Austin Fischer shares a surprising truth about the need to be vulnerable with our own faith if we are likely to have a positive im...