These pollyanna quotes will inspire you. Pollyanna is a person characterized by irrepressible optimism and a tendency to find good in everything or an excessively cheerful or optimistic person.
A collection of motivating, happy, and encouraging pollyanna quotes, pollyanna sayings, and pollyanna proverbs.
Best Pollyanna Quotes
- “‘Oh, yes,’ nodded Pollyanna emphatically. ‘He said he felt better right away, that first day he thought to count ’em. He said if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it – some.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “… there is something about everything that you can be glad about, if you keep hunting long enough to find it.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “Look, I hate to sound like Pollyanna, but I literally can’t wait to get to work in the morning. I’ve got steady jobs, I’ve got my health, and I’m here in the greatest city in the world. I’d be a pig not to be grateful” ~ Christopher Meloni
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“My relationship with “Pollyanna” is a very personal one, because Pollyanna got me through my childhood.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “If the prime directives were followed a little more accurately here on earth, I mean it sounds somewhat Pollyanna, but I think people would certainly get along better.” ~ Jonathan Frakes
- “… if God took the trouble to tell us eight hundred times to be glad and rejoice, He must want us to do it—SOME.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “Whenever someone calls me a Pollyanna, I consider it to be the highest of compliments. This courageous girl finds a community that has been torn apart with hate, fear, and pain and brings it love, courage and healing. Isn’t that what our world today needs more than anything?” ~ Joe Tye
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“Oh, yes; the game was to just find something about everything to be glad about—no matter what ’twas” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “What men and women need is encouragement. Their natural resisting powers should be strengthened, not weakened … Instead of always harping on a man’s faults, tell him of his virtues. Try to pull him out of his rut … Hold up to him his better self, his real self that can dare and do and win out! … People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “Be a balanced optimist. Nobody is suggesting that you become an oblivious Pollyanna, pretending that nothing bad can or ever will happen. Doing so can lead to poor decisions and invites people to take advantage of you. Instead, be a rational optimist who takes the good with the bad, in hopes of the good ultimately outweighing the bad, and with the understanding that being pessimistic about everything accomplishes nothing. Prepare for the worst but hope for the best – the former makes you sensible, and the latter makes you an optimist.” ~ Dale Carnegie
- “Wonder is not a Pollyanna stance, not a denial of reality; wonder is an acknowledgement of the power of the mind to transform, to notice, to decide what experience shall mean.” ~ Christina Baldwin
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“Oh, but Aunt Polly, Aunt Polly, you haven’t left me any time at all just to- to live.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “The influence of a beautiful, helpful, hopeful character is contagious. … People radiate what is in their minds and in their hearts.” ~ Eleanor Porter
- “I prefer to see myself as the Janus, the two-faced god who is half Pollyanna and half Cassandra, warning of the future and perhaps living too much in the past – a combination of both.” ~ Ray Bradbury
- “To affirm a person is to see the good in them that they cannot see in themselves and to repeat it in spite of appearances to the contrary. Please, this is not some Pollyanna optimism that is blind to the reality of evil, but rather like a fine radar system that is tuned in to the true, the good, and the beautiful.” ~ Brennan Manning
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“I hate the pollyanna pest who says that all is for the best.” ~ Franklin P. Adams
- “Consider the “new” woman. She’s trying to be Pollyanna Borgia, clearly a conflict of interest. She’s supposed to be a ruthless winner at work and a bundle of nurturing sweetness at home.” ~ Rita Mae Brown
- “Millions of Americans would still despair in the eight long years of the Depression that lay ahead and many of their individual dreams would be dashed on the rocks of economic hardship. But collectively, the country was in a new place, with a new confidence that the federal government would actively try to solve problems rather than fiddle or cater to the rich. Hope was no longer for Pollyannas; the cynics about the American system were in retreat.” ~ Jonathan Alter
- “That’s the way I look at things – if you focus on the worst case scenario and it happens, you’ve lived it twice. It sounds like Pollyanna-ish tripe but I’m telling you – it works for me.” ~ Michael J. Fox
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“I suffer from a genetic flaw, which is that my mother was a hopeless Pollyanna.” ~ Bill Ayers
- “There are really two kinds of optimism. There’s the complacent, Pollyanna optimism that says “don’t worry – everything will be just fine” and that allows one to just lay back and do nothing about the problems around you. Then there’s what we call dynamic optimism. That’s an optimism based on action.” ~ Ramez Naam
- “In all probability the Human Genome Project will, someday, find that I carry some recessive gene for optimism, because despite all my best efforts I still can’t scrape together even a couple days of hopelessness. Future scientists will call it the Pollyanna Syndrome, and if forced to guess, I’d say that mine has been a way-long case history of chasing rainbows.” ~ Chuck Palahniuk
- “I long ago discovered that you can’t TELL about Pollyanna. The minute you try to, she sounds priggish and preachy, and–impossible. Yet you and I know she is anything but that.” ~ Eleanor Porter
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“Don’t be a Pollyanna!” ~ Richard Diebenkorn
- “I’m an optimist in my heart – I’m a hopeless pollyanna just like my mother – but a pessimist in my head. I think that’s the dialectic we all need to be in.” ~ Bill Ayers
- “I’m grateful I had the strength to fight. It takes courage to believe the best is yet to come, especially when you are flat on your back and don’t know if you’re going to see tomorrow. I’m no Pollyanna, but I believe optimism is a choice — a muscle that gets stronger with use. Right foot, left foot…just keep moving.” ~ Robin Roberts
- “I’m not Pollyanna – I know that my personality and my opinions and how I approach the teaching of writing maybe isn’t exactly how it’s done traditionally in the academy…wherever that academy is…but, you know, the academy is broken as it relates to many creative writing programs.” ~ Tod Goldberg
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“I’m not a Pollyanna sort of kumbaya type.” ~ Dan Savage
- “I have been accused of being a Pollyanna, but I think there are plenty of people dealing with the darker side of human nature, and if I am going to write about people who are kind and generous and loving and thoughtful, so what? In my life I have met astonishingly good people.” ~ Ann Patchett
- “Anyone who looks for life can find it… and they don’t need to photograph ashcans. The average camera fan reminds me of Pollyanna, with a lollypop in one hand and a camera in the other. You can’t be a Nice Nelly and take news pictures.” ~ Weegee
- “My family absolutely comes first, and I don’t mean that in a Pollyanna way. It’s the focus of my life because it’s what makes me happy.” ~ Tracy Pollan
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“I do tend to be almost kind of Pollyanna-ish person.” ~ Anna Quindlen
- “I don’t find any real rivalries with crime and thriller writers anyway. That might sound a little Pollyanna, but for the most part the writers I compete with, if you want to use that word, it’s a pretty friendly rivalry. I think we all realise that the boat rises and sinks together.” ~ Harlan Coben
- “Balance in life is the key, as Aristotle taught us. Nobody likes a naive Pollyanna, but neither do we like to be around people who are constantly complaining and finding fault.” ~ Mark Skousen
- “The influence of a beautiful, helpful character is contagious, and may revolutionize a whole town.” ~ Graham Collier
