Top 152 Wishful Quotes & Sayings
Explore popular Wishful quotes.
Last updated on April 14, 2025.
Control was just wishful thinking, and you controlled things to hedge your bets, to be safe, to guard against loss.
To me, bitterness is the under-arm odor of wishful weakness. It is the graceless acknowledgment of defeat.
Writing what you wished was the most dangerous form of wishful thinking.
Providence and Manifest Destiny are synonyms often invoked to support arguments based on wishful thinking.
The whole iconography of ancient science is simply the fruit of wishful thinking.
Any belief in Creators or Purpose is wishful thinking. And when you point out that perhaps ALL thinking is wishful, reactions of intense irritation give evidence that we are not dealing with logic but with faith.
Real hope is much more than wishful musing. It stiffens, not slackens, the spiritual spine.
It isn't common sense that is paramount in this world, it's wishful thinking.
But hope has an astonishing resilience and strength. Its very persistence in our hearts indicates that it is not a tonic for wishful thinkers but the ground on which realists stand.
I want to think that there are better ways of obviating murder than to resort to capital punishment, but I realise that this may be wishful thinking on my part.
Peace is a militant state, which is not secured by wishful thinking. . . . If we are to be sure of our liberty, we must be ready to fight for it.
You should never wish for wishful thinking.
It had been wishful thinking, plain and simple, dangerous for me to indulge in. Hope, happiness and freedom were not in my future.
[Faith] is nothing more than wishful thinking, and the wish is no evidence of anything beyond itself. Yet so many religious people take their wishes for reality.
Hope is not mere wishful thinking. It is the precursor of a new dawn that slowly, steadily and unerringly comes to the fore and eventually grows into reality's existence.
memory is so selective; wishful thinking presses it into service all the time.
Turn wishful thinking into positive action. Those who take a proactive stance in their lives tend to have an ample supply of joy and pleasure
I am encouraged that there's going to be much better dialogue between the federal government and the state of Arizona. I mean, I hope that's not wishful thinking.
To me, you can be young in your mind, in the way you think, but if your body don't come with that, then it's wishful thinking.
If something is true, no amount of wishful thinking will change it.
The continual looking forward to the eternal world is not a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.
Biblical hope is not wishful thinking or an optimistic outlook; rather, it is a confident expectation based on the certainty of God's Word that as He has anchored us in the past, so He will in the future.
Wishful thinking is one thing, and reality another.
There is wishful thinking in Hell as well as on Earth.
Unplanned process improvement is wishful thinking.
The trouble with many religions, accused of wishful thinking, is that they are not wishful enough. They show a deplorable lack of imagination.
For me hope isn't wishful thinking or blind faith about the future. It's a stance toward life - one of curiosity and humility.
Any real belief in death is just wishful thinking.
I get by on wishful thinking that when you come home you'll want to stay.
If you have a dream of writing, that's wishful thinking. If you have a commitment to writing, that's the way to make your dreams come true.
Faith is not by wishful thinking, it is what takes root in the heart and shows in one's actions.
You can only live in the world you ken. The rest is just wishful thinking or paranoia.
I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.
The great hope for a quick and sweeping transition to renewable energy is wishful thinking.
Physical fitness can neither be acquired by wishful thinking nor by outright purchase.
My childhood was as conventional as you could get. I think I probably created 'Arcadia' with a certain amount of wishful thinking. I would have loved to have more looseness and freedom and community.
The notion that better engineering can solve all our problems is rooted in an ignorance of non-linear systems and selective/wishful thinking.
Suffice it to say that our over-reliance on testing is based largely on habit, wishful thinking, and leaps of faith.
I suppose . . . in writing you can't have regrets. I mean, you just get it down the way it was . . . it's only wishful thinking that things could be other than they were.
The proposition that the meek (that is the adaptable and serviceable), inherit the earth is not merely a wishful sentiment of religion, but an iron law of evolution.
[Freud's] sense of reality is less clouded by wishful thinking than is the case with other people and [he combines] the qualities of critical judgment, earnestness and responsibility.
It shouldn't make you sad to know you're loved, Grayson." But it did. It made him sad, and panicked, and for just a moment, wishful.
To be a good trader, you need to trade with your eyes open, recognize real trends and turns, and not waste time or energy on regrets and wishful thinking.
It's not "wishful" thinking.
Where there is life there is wishful thinking.
Wishful thinking is not sound public policy.
To some extent I'm guilty of wishful thinking. The absence of the interstitial I find unbearable.
No one seemed able to look at themselves, coolly, from the outside. Their reality was all that could be seen in the light cast ahead by their own wishful thinking.
Stop the habit of wishful thinking and start the habit of thoughtful wishes.
My plans are still in embryo, a town on the edge of wishful thinking.
Constraint theory defines for you what outcomes are possible and what outcomes are impossible. It also eliminates wishful thinking.
The idea that humans will always have a unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking.
The interesting adults are always the school failures, the weird ones, the losers, the malcontents, this isn’t wishful thinking. It’s the rule.
There is a great deal of wishful thinking in such cases it is the easiest thing of all to deceive ones self.
I'm not talking to you from the point of view of wishful thinking or imaginary craziness. i'm talking to you from a deeper, basic understanding.
Wishful thinking did not give Oregonians the bottle bill. Wishful thinking did not give the public access to beaches. Nor can we expect wishful thinking to turn around a decades-long disinvestment in our higher education system.
Scriptural hope is not wishful thinking. It's rock-solid assurance!
Hope is much more than wishful thinking. Hope is a way of moving through the world.
Don't settle for wishful thinking; make peace in your heart a reality.
The bubble hasn't popped yet and there's tremendous value in social media. ... But it's wishful thinking to believe that others on the 'me too' bandwagon will survive.
