The opposite of pessimism, optimism is a lifeview where one looks upon the world as a positive place. Optimists generally believe that people are inherently good. They have a "positive" outlook on life, believing that given time, things will work out in the end. A common example used to illustrate optimism is: given a glass that has been filled halfway, is it half filled? Or half empty?

"Two men looked out of prison bars, one saw mud, the other stars."

In philosophy, optimism is linked with the name of Gottfried Leibniz, who held that we live in the "best of all possible worlds," a theodicy for which he was famously mocked by Voltaire in his satirical novel Candide. Its opposite is philosophical pessimism. Perhaps even more optimistic than Leibniz was the anarchist philosopher William Godwin. He hoped that society would eventually reach the state where all violence and force would be replaced by calm reason, that matter could eventually be made subservient to mind and that the secret of immortality could be discovered. Some are surprised to learn that a freedom-loving anarchist like William Godwin disaproved of suicide, but this was down to his optimistic belief that suicide was almost always a mistake.

See also

• mood
• Is the glass half empty or half full