What is hopeful?

Famous quotes containing the word hopeful:

    Columbus has sailed westward of these isles by the mariner’s compass, but neither he nor his successors have found them. We are no nearer than Plato was. The earnest seeker and hopeful discoverer of this New World always haunts the outskirts of his time, and walks through the densest crowd uninterrupted, and, as it were, in a straight line.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    As the will to truth thus gains self-consciousness—there can be no doubt of that—morality will gradually perish now: this is the great spectacle in a hundred acts reserved for the next two centuries in Europe—the most terrible, most questionable, and perhaps also the most hopeful of all spectacles.
    Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)

    Scatter my ashes, strew them in the air:
    Lord since thou know’st where all these atoms are,
    I’m hopeful thou’lt recover once my dust,
    And confident thou’lt raise me with the just.
    —James Graham Marquess of Montrose (1612–1650)