Vaclav Havel, on Hope. It is:
"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, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation ... It is an orientation of the spirit, an orientation of the heart; it transcends the world that is immediately experienced, and is anchored somewhere beyond its horizons. I don't think you can explain it as a mere derivative of something here, of some movement, or of some favourable signs in the world. I feel that its deepest roots are in the transcendental, just as the roots of human responsibility are ... It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out."
-- from Seamus Heaney's 'The Redress of Poetry'