What’s the Use of Hope?

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I want to defend and buoy hope – it’s a fragile, quirky thing, but it has the power to help us act in the face of finitude

Hope is vitalising. When it pulses, we aspire toward better futures and conspire with what we have and have been. In its absence, we often grow listless, even court despair. I thus want to defend hope, underscore what we gain i... See more

John Lysaker • Our days are both rough and slippery. Hope brings traction | Psyche Ideas

Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes—you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable,

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

hope is not about what we expect. It is an embrace of the essential unknowability of the world, of the breaks with the present, the surprises.

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Hope is one of the Theological virtues. This means that a continual looking forward to the eternal world is not (as some modern people think) a form of escapism or wishful thinking, but one of the things a Christian is meant to do.

C. S. Lewis • Mere Christianity (C.S. Lewis Signature Classics)

Hope is not prognostication. 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. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously hea

Rebecca Solnit • Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities

Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.