The kind of hope that I often think about…I understand above all as a state of mind, not a state of the world.

Either we have hope within us, or we don’t. It is a dimension of the soul
It’s not essentially dependent upon some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation.

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, in the more occult sense... is the realization of the inner connectedness of all things; of your life and your daily activity with the cosmic scheme of things. The awareness of who you are, that you are the Self – that gives you faith or hope. Faith and hope stem from the same inner, intuitive realization of who you are, that you are here for a purpose and that nothing on Earth can shake that.... To have hope is to have complete faith in life. It does not mean to say that everything is going to go smoothly. It does not mean that on the outer, physical plane you will have a life of ease... and when you are telephoning people they will always be there and you will never have to try again. Many people think that if everything works easily and smoothly they are somehow on the right track. Following the line of least resistance is not necessarily the right way to live one’s life...

Hope, I would say, is of two kinds: there is the hope which is a wish-fulfilling fantasy... It can go a long way in sustaining the person in difficult circumstances. It is the kind of hope of Mr Micawber, a famous Charles Dickens character. He was always in dire straits, impecunious, but always living in hope, waiting “for something to turn up”. That kind of hope is astral desire, and will take you, as it took him, through a whole book, but will not of itself do other than sustain your ability to live life from day to day.

Being a hope is being in motion, on the move with body on the line, mind set on freedom, soul full of courage, and heart shot through with love. Being a hope is forging moral and spiritual fortitude, putting on intellectual armor, and being willing to live and die for the empowerment of the wretched of the earth.

"She says that people who wonder how you can have hope in seemingly hopeless situations, like a death camp, confuse hope with idealism. Idealism expects everything to be fair or easy or good. She says it's a defense mechanism not unlike denial or delusion. Hope, she says, does not deny the evil but is a response to it." I was beginning to see that hope was not just wishful thinking. It did take the facts and the obstacles into account, but it did not let them overwhelm or stop us. Certainly, this was true in many seemingly hopeless situations.

Hope — Hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The audacity of hope! In the end, that is God’s greatest gift to us...A belief in things not seen. A belief that there are better days ahead.

HOPE, n. Desire and expectation rolled into one.

Hope is the confusion of the desire for a thing with its probability.

Hope is really a thought.

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 sidelines 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.

Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. 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 heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.

Hope is a belief that what we do might matter, an understanding that the future is not yet written. It’s an informed, astute open-mindedness about what can happen and what role we might play in it. Hope looks forward but draws its energies from the past, from knowing histories, including our victories, and their complexities and imperfections. It means not fetishizing the perfect that is the enemy of the good, not snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, not assuming you know what will happen when the future is unwritten, and part of what happens is up to us.

Hope is an elixir of life. It is the engine that propels us forward in our pursuit of countless goals, all of which might otherwise be impossible to undertake if we were bereft of hope.

Having hope,” writes Daniel Goleman in his study of emotional intelligence, “means that one will not give in to overwhelming anxiety, a defeatist attitude, or depression in the face of difficult challenges or setbacks.” Hope is “more than the sunny view that everything will turn out all right”; it is “believing you have the will and the way to accomplish your goals.