"For the New Year, I wrote that the most important thing of all is for you not to lose faith and hope. As promised, I'd like to return briefly to that subject.
First of all: when I speak of faith and hope, I'm not thinking of optimism in the conventional sense, by which I we usually mean the belief that 'everything will turn out well.' I don't share such a belief and consider it - when expressed in that general way - a dangerous illusion. I don't know how 'everything' will turn out and therefore I have to admit the possibility everything - or at least most things - will turn out badly. Faith, however, does not depend upon prognoses about possible outcome. One may imagine a man with no faith who believes everything will turn out well, and a man with faith who expects everything to turn out badly. Optimism as I understand it here is not unequivocably positive and life-giving, but may well be the opposite: I have met many people who were full of euphoria and élan, most of it overblown, when they felt things would turn out well, but when they came round to the opposite point of view - usually at the first opportunity - they suddenly became profoundly skeptical. Their skepticism (usually expressed in catastrophic visions) was of course just as emotive, superficial and selective as their previous enthusiasm had been; it was merely the other side of the same coin. In short, the need for illusions in order to live one's life is not an expression of strength, but of weakness, and the consequences of such a life are just what one would expect."
Vaclav Havel
Letters to Olga
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