Losing hope? Here are some uplifting quotes to help you find your strength

When you feel like you are losing hope, sometimes a powerful quote can help you find strength and see the situation differently.

What the world needs, now more than ever, is hope.

When I say ‘hope’, you might be thinking airy-fairy hope or picturing pretty flowers and charitable causes. If so, think again.

The ‘hope’ I’m talking about is the most powerful driver of human achievement.

It’s active, not passive.

It’s strong, not feeble.

It’s courage, not fear.

Having ‘hope’ means clear thinking, not disillusionment. It’s ongoing, not an end point.

Hope is at the heart of every achievement because with hope comes meaning. With meaning, people feel engaged. Engaged people take action in their lives and in their work, and this action is what drives growth.

When students have hope it has been shown to improve their grades, build emotional resilience and boost athletic performance. Hope is truly essential at the best of times and the worst.

If you feel like you are losing hope, start by reframing your mindset and the way you think. The following quotes will give you strength and help you find hope again. With hope on your side, you can achieve incredible things, no matter what is going on around you.

Inspiring quotes on hope

“Hope is not a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. It is an axe you break down doors with in an emergency. Hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. To hope is to give yourself to the future – and that commitment to the future is what makes the present inhabitable.”
Rebecca Solnit

“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 begins to be a strength.”
G.K Chesterton

“Great hopes make great men/women.”
Thomas Fuller

“Hope is a projection of the imagination; so is despair. Despair all too readily embraces the ills it foresees; hope is an energy and arouses the mind to explore every possibility to combat them.”
Thornton Wilder

“Being a hunting species, humans must have hope. There must even be a program for hope springing eternally in our innards.”
Lionel Tiger

“Hope begins in the dark, the stubborn hope that if you just show up and try to do the right thing, the dawn will come. You wait and watch and work: You don’t give up.”
Anne Lamott

“Hope itself is like a star – not to be seen in the sunshine of prosperity, but only to be discovered in the night of adversity.”
C.H. Spurgeon

“Hope is a passion for the possible.”
Soren Kierkegaard

Quotes on hope in education

“Educating is always a vocation rooted in hopefulness. As teachers we believe that learning is possible, that nothing can keep an open mind from seeking after knowledge and finding a way to know.”
Bell Hooks

“Education breeds confidence. Confidence breeds hope. Hope breeds peace.”
Confucius

“Literacy is a bridge from misery to hope.”
Kofi Annan

“It’s the hope of folks like my dad who got up every day to do his job at the city water plant; the hope that one day, his kids would go to college and have opportunities he never dreamed of. That’s the kind of hope that every single one of us — politicians, parents, preachers — all of us need to be providing for our young people. Because that is what moves this country forward every single day — our hope for the future and the hard work that hope inspires.”
Michelle Obama

“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.”
Albert Einstein

“Education is the great equalizer of our time. It gives hope to the hopeless and creates chances for those without.”
Kofi Annan

“How then is perfection to be sought? Wherein lies our hope? In education, and in nothing else.”
Immanuel Kant

When you’re losing hope, these quotes on leadership will help

“Competence is essential, but it’s not enough. The great voices of history have always been the voices of optimism and hope.”
Bob Herbert

“Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Either we have hope within or we don’t; it is a dimension of the soul not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation. It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons.”
Vaclav Havel

“You have the power to choose hope. And you choose giving hope to people. That’s the secret of leadership. Nothing complicated. You don’t have to take a test; you just have to meet the test of life.”
Peter Koestenbaum

“Leaders are dealers in hope.”
Napoleon Bonaparte

“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centres of energy and daring those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”
Robert Kennedy

“Hope is not blind optimism. It’s not ignoring the enormity of the task ahead or the roadblocks that stand in our path. It’s not sitting on the side lines or shirking from a fight. Hope is that thing inside us that insists, despite all evidence to the contrary, that something better awaits us if we have the courage to reach for it, and to work for it, and to fight for it. Hope is the belief that destiny will not be written for us, but by us, by the men and women who are not content to settle for the world as it is, who have the courage to remake the world as it should be.”
Barack Obama

Find strength from these positive psychology-based quotes on hope

“Grit depends on a different kind of hope. It rests on the expectation that our own efforts can improve our future. ‘I have a feeling tomorrow will be better’ is different from ‘I resolve to make tomorrow better’. The hope that gritty people have has nothing to do with luck and everything to do with getting up again.”
Angela Duckworth

“Hope is more than distancing oneself from and delimiting the impact of failures; hope is the essential process of linking oneself to potential success.”
C.R Snyder

“Hope is created moment to moment through our deliberate choices. It happens when we use our thoughts and feelings to temper our aversion to loss and actively pursue what is possible. When we choose hope, we define what matters to us most.”
Shane Lopez

“Hopefulness is teachable.”
Martin Seligman

“Hope is not an emotion; it’s a way of thinking or a cognitive process.”
Brené Brown

“Belief and expectation—the key elements of hope—can block pain by releasing the brain’s endorphins and enkephalins, mimicking the effects of morphine.”
Jerome Groopman

“Hope is a motor not a meter.”
Martin Seligman

Quotes on hope in the movies

“Hope is the only thing stronger than fear. A little hope is effective, a lot of hope is dangerous.”
President Snow – The Hunger Games (2012)

“He was the single most hopeful person I’ve ever met and am ever likely to meet again.”
Nick Carraway – The Great Gadsby (2013)

“The symbol of the house El means hope. Embodied within that hope is the fundamental belief in the potential of every person to be a force for good.”
Jor-El – Superman (2013)

“It’s easy to feel hopeful on a beautiful day like today, but there will be dark days ahead of us, too. There will be days when you feel alone, and that is when hope is needed most. No matter how buried it gets or how lost you feel, you must promise me that you will hold onto hope. Keep it alive. We have to be greater than what we suffer. My wish for you is to become hope – people need that. And even if we fail, what better way is there to live?”
Gwen Stacy – The Amazing Spider-Man 2 (2014)

“We will do what we have always done, Jim. We will find hope in the impossible.”
Commander Spock – Star Trek Beyond (2016)

“Hope is like the sun. If you only believe in it when you see it you’ll never make it through the night.”
Leia Organa – Star Wars: Episode VIII – The Last Jedi (2017)

“I’m hoping if you play this back, it’s in celebration. I hope families are reunited, I hope we get it back and something like a normal version of the planet has been restored, if there ever was such a thing.”
Tony Stark – Avengers Endgame (2019)

Proverbs for when you feel like you’re losing hope

“While I breathe, I hope.”
Latin Proverb

“It is never winter in the land of hope.”
Russian Proverb

“If it were not for hope, the heart would break.”
Greek Proverb

“Hope is the last thing ever lost.”
Italian Proverb

“He who has health, has hope. And he who has hope, has everything.”
Arabian Proverb

“With a little seed of imagination, you can grow a field of hope.”
African Proverb

“Where there is life, there is hope.”
Jewish Proverb

Over the last 20 years I have written much on the concept of hope. Below are some of my own musings. I trust you will find them encouraging.

Quotes on not losing hope by Glen Gerreyn

“Hope is not a trivial or an ethereal idea. Hope at its best is grounded in reality, encourages vulnerability and is filled with abundant possibility.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope awakens the mind.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope changes the world when hope means action.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope is deeper than logic. By saying ‘Yes!’ to hope suffering and pain can be transformed into human achievement.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope is active. A state of being. A way of living.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope opens us up to life. And when obstacles strike, hope keeps us up in life.”
Glen Gerreyn

“Hope is the most powerful driver of human achievement. It’s active, not passive. It’s strong, not feeble. It’s courage, not fear. It’s clear thinking, not disillusionment. It’s ongoing, not an end point.”
Glen Gerreyn

Losing hope? Create your own hope and build your personal strength

Now here’s a task for you. Take a look at the following ideas and finish a few of them to create your own quote on hope.

Hope will ignite ___________

Hope will make me ___________

Hope will change ______________

Hope will sustain ______________

Hope will illuminate _____________

Hope will enable ________________

Hope will strengthen________________

Hope will raise ____________________

Hope will awaken ___________________

Print out your quote or make a poster and place it near where you study so you can see it every day.

Right now, you may feel like you are losing hope. Use the quotes above to find strength then start by setting some small goals and making a plan to achieve them. From there, you’ll find it easier to gain momentum and create an amazing future for yourself.

Glen Gerreyn

For the past twelve years Glen has made speaking and writing his career. Collectively he has spoken to over 500,000 people around the world. He works with children and parents, high school students, employees and business leaders, sporting groups and community organisations. In 2012 he received international accreditation as a Certified Speaking Professional (CSP). He’s spoken at world famous TEDx events, appeared on the Today Show and Can of Worms, ABC national radio, and written blogs for mamamia.com. He’s written four books — Gifted for Greatness, Men of Honour, Oxygen 102, Get Your Hopes Up.