On Hope and "The Real World"

The kind of hope that I often think about...I understand above all as 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...[Hope] is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.

~Vaclav Havel