"Optimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... church to make good the promise of the optimist? Let us explore the "amen corner" and see how many pious souls we shall there find whose incomes are chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral purposes. Even while I write I see an old white-haired man, whose power in prayer ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... housekeeping for two. More than that, he put himself upon a rigid allowance for pocket-money—an allowance barely sufficient to keep him in tobacco and papers. All this without consulting Miss Conroy's wishes—which only goes to show that Rowdy Vaughan was a born optimist. ...
— Rowdy of the Cross L • B.M. Sinclair, AKA B.M. Bower
... apprenticeship, it is never written as if he anticipated the publisher and the editor. Good examples are his letters to a reviewer, who, criticizing him without knowing him, wrote as if he were either an insensible athletic optimist, or a sufferer who was a poseur. "The fact is, consciously or not, you doubt my honesty.... Any brave man may make out a life which shall be happy for himself, and, by so being, beneficent to those about him. And if he fail, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... If some ill-advised optimist ventured to question a particularly lugubrious statement, he was challenged to explain the betting, which had crept up to six to one on ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... the mountains seemed to make a mystic answering. He was a romantic—some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to himself; and it had suddenly ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... mission of the party in power will be fulfilled; then will have been demonstrated the capacity of man for self-government; then a just nation, founded upon the full and free consent of its citizens will be no longer a dream of the optimist. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... the brutes—the mortal paradox that has puzzled all thinkers from the Psalmist to Pascal. For the unbeliever this must ever be the ugly reverse of all glories that are merely material, though the sensuous optimist need not allow the skeleton at the ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlyle's later utterances. Even in presence of the doubt as to man's personal immortality he takes refuge in a high and stoical faith. ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... long as people remain on what such an invaluable optimist might call the low level of sensuous thought, and so long as we imagine that we exist and suffer, an aristocratic regimen can only be justified by radiating benefit and by proving that were less given to those above less would be attained by those beneath them. Such reversion ...
— The Life of Reason • George Santayana
... and swamps of the "Long House" by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked forward confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in England" between the extremities of that country. The vision of a nation closely linked by wellworn paths of commerce ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... Ruskin. Because he frowned at the cockney cheerfulness of the cheaper economists, they and others represented him as a pessimist, and reduced all his azure infinities to a fit of the blues. But Carlyle's philosophy, more carefully considered, will be found to be dangerously optimist rather than pessimist. As a thinker Carlyle is not sad, but recklessly and rather unscrupulously satisfied. For he seems to have held the theory that good could not be definitely defeated in this world; and that everything in the long run finds its right level. It began with ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... they drove along they talked of the improvement on the farm and the profit they ought to be able to earn with the new equipment. Bob was the optimist and his uncle the pessimist in these discussions, but optimistic Bob was not without his pencil and memorandum book and usually had the better of the argument because of his uncle's disinclination to take the time to figure out the advantages ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... snug little party,' exclaimed that charming optimist, Lady Kirkbank. 'I hate a crowd on a drag. The way some of the members of the Four-in-hand Club load their coaches on parade reminds ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... of the others. His father was frozen to death in Eskimo Bay some years ago whilst hunting food for his family. Although David is always boasting of his strength and the superior wisdom of his years, yet he is really very tiny for his age. He is a delightful little optimist, who announces cheerfully after each failure to do right that he is "going to be good all the time now," to which we add the mental reservation, "until next time." He is the proud possessor of a Teddy bear. This long-suffering ...
— Le Petit Nord - or, Annals of a Labrador Harbour • Anne Elizabeth Caldwell (MacClanahan) Grenfell and Katie Spalding
... one had the time to make it all out, be shown to be the sufficient basis for a belief in, and a logical ground for anticipating, the progress of man toward moral and spiritual perfection. A healthy man is an optimist. Pessimism is the product of dyspepsia; and all the intermediate phases of philosophy come from some want of normal brain-action. Following out the Darwinian theory,—supported as it seems to be by the facts,—one must believe that the human race as a whole ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... cannot establish the best system of laws, he will endeavour to establish the best that the people can bear."[168] Turgot made too little account, he thought, of the resisting power of vested interests and confirmed habits. He was too optimist, and the peculiarity attaches to his theoretical as well as his practical work. Smith himself was prone rather to the contrary error of overrating the resisting power of interests and prejudices. If Turgot was too sanguine when he told the king that popular education ...
— Life of Adam Smith • John Rae
... know? They know that you are a bore or not a bore, a grouser or not a grouser, generous or mean, sentimental or cynical, an optimist or a pessimist, and that you have or have not a sense of humour. None of these is a criminal offence. Is there anything else that your friends can say about you which can establish the likelihood of your innocence? Not very much. Nor should ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... sickness and health, fatigue and rest seem to impair his courage, hope and general cheerfulness of mood but little. He has a high organic balance and a well-built-up philosophy. I started to say of him that he is an optimist, but this is not true. He is cheerful, but he does not sing, "Tra la la, all the things that are, are good." He says, "There are bad things, but I must carry on and fight the good fight." His is a philosophy ...
— The Foundations of Personality • Abraham Myerson
... took over the command of what, I was informed by a Staff Officer qualified to know, was the best Territorial Brigade in the Kingdom, I was a firm believer in the Territorial Force. But I hardly think that the most hardened optimist would at that time have thought it possible for a Territorial Division to mobilise and march complete with equipment and Transport to its Mobilisation area on the sixth day after receiving the order "Mobilise." The amount of work done by Battalions and Companies was marvellous and only ...
— The Sherwood Foresters in the Great War 1914 - 1919 - History of the 1/8th Battalion • W.C.C. Weetman
... other who believed in the Tennessee land—Jane Clemens's favorite cousin, James Lampton, the courtliest, gentlest, most prodigal optimist of all that guileless race. To James Lampton the land always had "millions in it"—everything had. He made stupendous fortunes daily, in new ways. The bare mention of the Tennessee land sent him off into figures that ended with the purchase ...
— Mark Twain, A Biography, 1835-1910, Complete - The Personal And Literary Life Of Samuel Langhorne Clemens • Albert Bigelow Paine
... Don Juan, powerful enough, under the stress of self-defence, to confuse the distinctions of right and wrong. But, as we shall try to show in the next chapter, such an apparent justification of evil cannot be avoided by a reflective optimist; and it is implicitly contained even in those religious utterances of Rabbi Ben Ezra, Christmas Eve, and A Death in the Desert, with which we not only identify the poet but ourselves, in so far as we share ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... I am an incorrigible optimist! and I truly believe that the world is advancing in every way and that we are already in the dawn of a new era of the understanding, and the exploitation for our benefit of the great forces of nature. But we of the majority of non-scientists, were until so lately sound asleep to any speculative ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Protestant mysticism is an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which hangs over the future state.'[563] This is very strongly marked in all the later productions of Law's mind. He was very far from taking anything like an optimist view of the world around him. There is no writer of his age who shows himself more impressed with an abhorrence of sin, and with the sense of its widespread and deeply rooted influences. He is austere even to excess in his views of what godliness requires. His whole ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... Rome, the only true Church," they persisted in decreeing the suppression of the Inquisition and the secularization of ecclesiastical property. That such a radical constitution would be understood and championed forthwith by the whole Spanish people, only the most confirmed and fanatical optimist could believe, but, on the other hand, it was certain that the Spaniards as a nation were resolved that the Continental System and the Bonaparte family must go. They might sacrifice ...
— A Political and Social History of Modern Europe V.1. • Carlton J. H. Hayes
... nothing of the shellfish about her; she's a live woman, as well as a mighty pretty one, and she cares enough about you to keep you awake and in the game. I congratulate you, Kent, and I'm almost as happy as you are. Also I shall play the optimist at our next directors' meeting; I see signs of a boom in the literature factory. Go to it, my son. ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... if they are to expect any degree of success, must be added a raison d'etre for the publication; and, besides, there must be an accompaniment of managerial ability sufficient to give the reason a continual demonstration in fact. Whatever the view of the cheerful optimist who stands on the threshold of the magazine world, with his experience, like his hoped-for triumphs, all in the future, the conditions above named, as witnessed by the broken lance of many a vanquished knight of this "Round Table," are not easily met. It is with a full understanding ...
— The New England Magazine, Volume 1, No. 1, January 1886 - Bay State Monthly, Volume 4, No. 1, January, 1886 • Various
... Harnden is quite an operator, son. Jumps, as I have said. A good optimist. Jumps up so high every day that he can see over all the bothersome hills into the Promised Land of Plenty. Only trouble is that Joe's jumping apparatus is so geared that he only jumps straight up and lands back in the same place. Now, if only he ...
— When Egypt Went Broke • Holman Day
... displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... and the Greek differ in most essentials. The one is by habit and training a good soldier, a proverbial idler, an easygoing optimist endowed with genial temper and a happy-go-lucky nature, capable indeed of extremes, yet mostly inclined to the tolerant indifference that leaves things as they are; the other, whose martial qualities have vanished in the melting pot of time, has developed the defensive traits that come ...
— A Son of the Immortals • Louis Tracy
... Viola, if not a Gwendolen, is yet an unloving wife. Sir Douglas Roy plays a somewhat difficult role—that of friend to the husband and undeclared lover to the wife—without losing our respect. He is in many ways a successful hero, and acts his part without either insipidity or priggishness. A genial optimist like Mrs. Forrester, as her old readers may well believe, sacrifices to a hopelessly unhappy marriage no lot which interests us. Disagreeable husbands die at an auspicious moment, and everybody is finally made ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XXVI., December, 1880. • Various
... herself. From time to time, as her look dwelt on Laura, she was conscious of certain guilty reserves and concealments in her own breast. She wished Hubert had more sense—she hoped to goodness it would all go off nicely! But of course it would. Polly was an optimist and took all things simply. Her anxieties for Laura did not long resist the mere pleasure of the journey and the trip, the flatteries of expectation. What a very respectable and, on the whole, good-looking young man was Mr. Seaton! Polly had met him first at the Browhead ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the preacher must live. To lose it is despair. No one has so many disappointments as the idealist; but it is the glorious fact that no one cares about his disappointments less. Not that he does not see them, but because he sees beyond them. The true preacher—he is your incorrigible optimist. Some men form their expectations of the future out of material supplied in tables of statistics, ecclesiastical Blue Books, censuses of church attendance, returns and percentages. Not so the true preacher. ...
— The Message and the Man: - Some Essentials of Effective Preaching • J. Dodd Jackson
... enough for a hero that he succeed without being clever or good, but neither did Graham pass this doubtful and dangerous test. For when you clear away the romance which heroic poetry and excited prose have flung around him, you were an optimist if you did not see his life was one long failure as well as a disappointment and a sorrow. He did bravely with the Prince of Orange, and yet somehow he missed promotion; he was the best officer the government had in Scotland, and yet it was only in the last resort ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... facing) kontrauxe. Opposition kontrauxmeto—ado. Oppress subpremi. Oppressor tirano, subpremanto. Opprobrium malnobleco, malgloro. Optics optiko. Optical optika. Optician optikisto. Optimism optimismo. Optimist optimisto. Option elekto—ajxo. Opulence ricxeco. Opulent ricxa. Opusculum libreto, brosxuro. Or aux. Oracle orakolo. Oral vocxa, parola. Orange orangxo. Orange (colour) orangxkolora. Orangery orangxerio. Oration ...
— English-Esperanto Dictionary • John Charles O'Connor and Charles Frederic Hayes
... he was happy and rejoicing that he was a free man again. When I informed him of the drifts in our favour from other parts of the country and said that it was too early to concede anything, he said: "Tumulty, you are an optimist. It begins to look as if the defeat might be overwhelming. The only thing I am sorry for, and that cuts me to the quick, is that the people apparently misunderstood us. But I have no regrets. We have tried to do our duty." So far as he was concerned, the issue ...
— Woodrow Wilson as I Know Him • Joseph P. Tumulty
... Julio was an optimist. What did all this restlessness signify to a man who had just been living more than twenty days among Germans, crossing the Atlantic under the ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... "caviare to the general." Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith. Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... of great capabilities who only just fell short of being learned, with a clear, critical intellect; a man without any illusions about Society, the State, Literature, or anything else, and especially not about women; but yet he was the craziest Optimist as soon as he got upon the subject of actresses, theatrical princesses and heroines; he was one of those men, who, like Hacklaender, cannot discover the Ideal of Virtue anywhere, except in ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... old-fashioned notions with respect to women, rather singular in so young a man,—for he was only thirty; he preferred to believe in their goodness, in spite of any amount of demonstration to the contrary; it vexed him to be reminded of the shortcomings of his friends; by nature he was an optimist, and had a large amount of faith in people's good intentions. 'He meant well, poor fellow, in spite of his failures,' was a speech I have heard more than once from his lips. He was always ready to condone a fault or heal a breach; indeed, ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... Optimist, as I try to be, I am not one of those who believe that the Negro has reached the delectable mountain, and that he is as good as anybody else. He is far from perfection, far from comparison with the more favored Anglo-Saxon, in wealth and culture, yet he has made ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... own—"such is life"—that is our ultimate comment. An appreciation of tragedy involves, therefore, a sure discernment of the essential disharmony of existence, yet at the same time, a feeling for the moral values which it may create; neither the optimist nor the utilitarian can enter into ...
— The Principles Of Aesthetics • Dewitt H. Parker
... that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could say, you find most ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... is no optimist either in regard to French character or the progress of public affairs," said Lafayette, bitingly. "But I can assure him that if the French are inconstant, ignorant, and immoral, they are also energetic, lively, and easily aroused by noble examples. Moreover, the public mind has been instructed ...
— Calvert of Strathore • Carter Goodloe
... host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... beaten to a finish on the Rhine and the allied armies cross Germany as conquerors, unopposed. If they only could! It would only be what is due to Belgium that King Albert should lead the procession "Under the Lindens." But I doubt if the maddest war optimist hopes for anything so well deserved as that. I don't dare to, sure as I am of seeing Germany beaten to her knees before the ...
— A Hilltop on the Marne • Mildred Aldrich
... person of Mr. Flummery Flam, the least insinuating and the least plausible personage that ever performed the easy task of gulling a nation. His manners were vulgar, his voice was sharp, and his language almost unintelligible. Flummery Flam was a provisional optimist. He maintained that everything would be for the best, if the nation would only follow his advice. He told the Vraibleusians that the present universal and overwhelming distress was all and entirely and ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... rejoined Barry, the optimist. "A light haze and a calm sea is what we want. We'll run her down in less than a week, you ...
— The Submarine Hunters - A Story of the Naval Patrol Work in the Great War • Percy F. Westerman
... the world to reform it. His aim was to amuse himself, and if in so doing he entertained or gratified others, so much the better. "Reform away," he was once reported as saying, "reform away, but as for me, the world is good enough for me as it is. I am a thorough optimist. In temperament I'm a little like old Horace—I want to get all the happiness out of the world that's possible." And he got it, not intermittently and in chunks, but day by day and every ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... the day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously long. She was at the station before the train arrived. A delay had been signalled. It weighed heavily upon her. Optimist in her projects, and placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason. The gray light, which the three-quarters of ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... any message is genuinely to be found there, of the nine symphonies of Ludwig van Beethoven, or, at any rate, of the three which show any intellectual content at all. Mark Twain, superficially a humourist and hence an optimist, was haunted by it in secret, as Nietzsche was by the idea of eternal recurrence: it forced itself through his guard in "The Mysterious Stranger" and "What is Man?" In Shakespeare, as Shaw has demonstrated, it amounts ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress—the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel—stood unnoticed at the young man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from his gloomy meditations to address her. When he turned to her at last, ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This has been called his "pessimism," a phrase to which some admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... its normal course; a great Pole's philosophy receiving flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. ("If he could understand," exclaimed Keredec, "that the individual must be immortal before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some intelligence!") On the surface everything was as ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... fourchette" said Barrett Browning to me; "he was not very fond of meat, but liked all kinds of Italian dishes, especially with rich sauces. He always ate freely of rich and delicate things. He could make a whole meal off mayonnaise." It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast. Unlike Carlyle and Tennyson, who smoked constantly, Browning never used tobacco; he drank wine with his meals, but sparingly, and never more than one kind of wine at a dinner. While physically robust, fond of riding and walking, never using a ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... Boston; we are paid it in advance. It's the wages of adventure, and the wide world knows the feel Of the stuff that stirs good huntsmen all and brings the hounds to heel! It's the one reward that's gratis and precedes the toilsome task— It's the one thing always better than an optimist can ask! It's amusing, it's amazing, and it's never twice the same; It's the salt of true adventure and the ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... where we stand on our national energy effort today reminds me of the old argument about whether the tank is half full or half empty. The pessimist will say we have half failed to achieve our 10-year energy goals; the optimist will say that we have half succeeded. I am always an optimist, but we must make up ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... of the misery and disorder which pervaded society, and fatigued with jostling against artificial fools, Rousseau became enamoured of solitude, and, being at the same time an optimist, he labours with uncommon eloquence to prove that man was naturally a solitary animal. Misled by his respect for the goodness of God, who certainly for what man of sense and feeling can doubt it! gave ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... optimist could not have deluded himself into the belief that the words were spoken in a friendly and genial spirit. Lord Wisbeach's fingers tightened on the door-handle, and he grew a ...
— Piccadilly Jim • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... Paul, have found it. How long it has taken, and how much blood has been spilt before this or that most obvious folly has been abolished! With what absurd tenacity have men flown in the face of reason and flouted common sense! So our Optimist, looking into the conditions which made Civil Service Reform imperative, will shed tears either of pity ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... not seen since the disastrous optimist's flight into Wales; nor had there come any remittance from him since the cheque for a hundred pounds. Two or three times, however, Godfrey had written—thoroughly characteristic letters—warm, sanguine, self-reproachful. From Wales he had crossed over to Ireland, where he was working at a scheme ...
— Will Warburton • George Gissing
... to see all his pure ideals and the possibilities of perfection soiled and trampled upon by thoughtless mechanics, aimless mockers and babbling reformers. The humorist may be—and very often is—a sceptic, a pessimist, a nihilist; the satirist is invariably a believer, an optimist, an idealist. For let this dangerous man only come face to face, not with his enemies, but with his ideals, and you will see—as in "Atta Troll"—what a generous friend, what an ardent lover, what a great poet he is. Thus no one ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... was banded with the Red-Cross badge. Then he shuffled back to his former post and sat himself down on his heels once more. Kruger Bobs possessed the racial traits which make it an easy matter to sit and wait for news. He was also an optimist. Nevertheless, his face now was overcast and rarely did it vanish behind the spreading limits ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... concerning those objects—to seize upon things, opportunities, persons, ideas, and facts tending to promote the objects thought of. The man who is looking for facts to prove certain theories, invariably finds them, and is also quite likely to overlook facts tending to disprove his theory. The Optimist and the Pessimist passing along the same streets, each sees thousands of examples tending to fit in with his idea. As Kay says: "When one is engaged in seeking for a thing, if he keep the image of it clearly before the mind, he will be very ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... exhibition was received either in ominous silence or, in some quarters, with something like derision. As I have said before, there comes a time when the best-disposed debtors do not regard themselves as being repaid by promises, and when the most enthusiastic optimist desires to see something more than samples. It was only old Colon going round with his show again—flamingoes, macaws, seashells, dye-woods, gums and spices; some people laughed, and some were angry; but all were united in thinking that ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... be known that the pleuro-pneumonia often mentioned as a scare or a myth by the thoughtless and optimist is a stern reality. Its journeys and track of destruction among cattle have been as marked as that of small pox and cholera—contagious diseases which have so tearfully decimated the human family. Lung diseases of the modern type were known before ...
— Prairie Farmer, Vol. 56: No. 1, January 5, 1884. - A Weekly Journal for the Farm, Orchard and Fireside • Various
... no end of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... held his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line in his ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... He's a combination of optimist and fatalist, I judge. He thinks nothing matters much, for everything is coming out ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... an optimist," replied Percy laughingly. "Soils do not wear out; there is no poor land; the farms are better and the crops larger than ever before; and we are the people of the world's greatest nation, with an assured future glory ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... liberators.... The best propaganda, the most efficacious, because spontaneous and unexpected, is done by the officer and his men. The Italian officer ... with the harmony of manners which distinguishes him, obtains very easily the sympathies of this population, a sympathy, however, which for an optimist may become dangerous. Young officers must not forget that the propagators of the great Yugoslavia still exercise with their megalomania a potent influence over the primitive population and that a gesture of theirs, a word, an attitude, may even yet indirectly favour the Croat cause ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... personal continuity, so, conversely, our inner experience, our remembered or imagined joys and sorrows throw a reflection on the outer world, giving it its degree of worth. Hence the contradictory, and consequently to some extent at least illusory, views of the optimist and the pessimist, "intuitions" which, I have tried to show elsewhere, are connected with deeply rooted habits of feeling, and are antecedent to all ...
— Illusions - A Psychological Study • James Sully
... practised what he preached. He did not preach renunciation; he was not a Pessimist any more than an Optimist. Sometimes he felt he was not doing enough; he knew very well that others thought so. I remember his saying, in his rooms at Oxford in one of those years: "Here I am, trying to reform the world, and ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... clergymen in my day, but his reading is beautiful; I can't say as I ever heard reading as could equal it;—and them choristers, though they're hawful to manage, is trained as I never see boys trained in my life afore. There's one of them houses, ma'am," continued the optimist, turning to Miss Wentworth, "as is a beauty. Miss Wodehouse can tell you what it is; no lady in the land could desire a handsomer drawing-room; and as for the kitchings,—I don't pretend to be a judge ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... not the mud-clerk who ran aground—good, non-committal soul, who never look sides where it would do him any harm, and who never worried himself about anything. Dear, drawling, optimist philosopher, who could see how other people's mishaps were best for them, and who took good care not to have any himself! It was not he that ...
— The End Of The World - A Love Story • Edward Eggleston
... a possibility," Stubby continued, quite cheerfully, however. "I don't propose to allow it to happen. Hang it, I wouldn't blat this to any one but you, Jack. The mater has only a hazy idea of how things stand, and she's an incurable optimist anyway. Nelly and the Infant—you haven't met the Infant yet—don't know anything about it. I tell you it put the breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and learned how things stood. I thought I'd ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... the French critic to whom I alluded at an earlier stage of this essay. To speak of Hawthorne, as M. Emile Montegut does, as a romancier pessimiste, seems to me very much beside the mark. He is no more a pessimist than an optimist, though he is certainly not much of either. He does not pretend to conclude, or to have a philosophy of human nature; indeed, I should even say that at bottom he does not take human nature as hard as he may seem to do. "His bitterness," ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... would adopt. Then Carew called from the camp and she went back, while Millicent sat still with grave doubts in her heart. Bella's faith in her husband was warranted, and Millicent was enough of an optimist to believe that such men were not uncommon—there was Lisle, for example, and Nasmyth. With them one would undoubtedly have something to build a happy and profitable life upon—but what could be done with one in ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... calm sky above, so the events which will befall an individual are marked upon the delicate spiritual barometer which forms a part of his being, and can be read with unerring precision by the clear and practiced eye of the optimist. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... was fifty, but the fifty of the hard-riding optimist of the great outdoors. The smooth tan of his cheeks contrasted oddly with the silver of his close-cropped hair. He appeared as a young ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... out!" declared Ned, who was something of an optimist. "You've been in salt mines before, haven't ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... the world is a bad place, the optimist is sure that it can be good. That is the point of the book. Chesterton has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he says so ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... convictions would have suited a thorough-going pessimist. Neither Swift nor Carlyle could have gone much beyond him in condemning the actual state of the political or religious condition of the world. Things, on the whole, were in many directions going from bad to worse. The optimist is apt to regard these views as wicked, and I do not know whether it will be considered as an aggravation or an extenuation of his offence that, holding such opinions, Fitzjames could be steadily cheerful. I simply state the fact. His freedom from ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... Foster had been a man worthy the steel of Mr. Darrow. Not that Prof. Foster was an unscrupulous optimist. He was merely an intellectual whose congenital tendencies were idealistic, just as Mr. Darrow's psychic and subconscious tendencies were anti-idealistic. And apart from this divergence of congenital tendencies Mr. Darrow and Prof. Foster had a great deal in common. They both loved argument. They ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... himself, and to show how they were steadily getting rich because orders were pouring in, though a cloud that resembled bankruptcy loomed always a little higher upon the horizon. If Hall had not been young and an optimist, he would have been frightened out of his boots early in the game. As it was, he made a brave steady fight, kept as cheerful and stiff an upper lip as possible, always hoping that something would happen—some grand sale ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... and Austria were outnumbered by at least three to one. But on this particular morning, people were too stunned for calculations. The incredible had happened. The long-discussed war—the nightmare of the nervous, the derision of the optimist—had actually materialised. The happy-go-luck years of peace and plenty had suddenly come to an end. Black tragedy ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... where difficulties most pressed upon himself, and where Mr. Palmer had missed the real substance of such difficulties. Looking at it by the light of after-events, we can see the contradiction and reaction produced by Mr. Palmer's too optimist statements. Still, Mr. Newman's praise was sincere and discriminating. But Mr. Palmer's book, though never forgotten, scarcely became, what it at another time might well ...
— The Oxford Movement - Twelve Years, 1833-1845 • R.W. Church
... honor of the house party, and had produced a succession of dishes, which in happier days Mr. Peters would have devoured eagerly. To be compelled by considerations of health to pass these by was enough to damp the liveliest optimist. Mr. Peters had suffered terribly. Occasions of feasting and revelry like the present were for him so many battlefields, on ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... a well-meaning blunderer, has tried to set things right, first by planting some natural affection for his small boy into the stony heart of the parent, and, second, by making the small boy himself an optimist. Happily, there is always a silver lining to the cloud that hovers over the small boy, even when the cane is descending upon him. Trifles please the poor little fellow and help him to forget the gloom which surrounds ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... Indeed, there is scarcely a form of disorganization and of disorder which Jefferson does not extract from some elementary principle or natural right. We do not mean to accuse him of doing wrong deliberately. Jefferson was an optimist. All was for the best—at least, all that he did; for he was naturally predisposed to object to any measure which did not originate with himself or had not been submitted to his judgment. His elementary ...
— Continental Monthly, Vol. 5, Issue 2, February, 1864 • Various
... the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... socialism as it exists in its crudest form, and as it must exist up here in the North. My material for this last book will show what tremendous progress the civilization of two centuries on this continent has made over the lowest and wildest forms of human brotherhood. That's my idea, Ranny. I'm an optimist. I believe that every invention we make, that every step we take in the advancement of science, of mental and physical uplift, brings us just so much nearer to the Nirvana of universal love. This trip of mine among your wild people of the North ...
— The Grizzly King • James Oliver Curwood
... books that should sell sometimes do not "move" at all, and those that apparently have but little to recommend them turn out to be the best of the bunch so far as sales are concerned. A jobber has to be something of an optimist; he must keep his ear to the ground, and, like certain types of politicians, must be prepared to give the people what they want when they want it. He can of course help along the demand for good books and check that for ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... Chet. But be an optimist. I might 'a' busted you high and wide with that quirt instead of giving you a nice little easy tap that just did the business. There's no manner of use being regretful over past mistakes," Dave ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... such comparisons justify the conclusion that the upper grades of skilled labour have made considerable advances, and that the lower grades of regular unskilled labourers have to a less degree shared in this advance, they do not warrant the optimist conclusion often drawn from them, that poverty is a disease which left alone will cure itself, and which, in point of fact, is curing itself rapidly. Before we consent to accept the evidence of improvement in the average condition of the labouring ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... morning his excitement had somewhat abated. Of course he was tremendously lucky to have found a Princess. (Being an optimist, you see, he assumed that she would reappear.) But it was quite another matter to persuade her to kiss him. Still, he didn't give up hope, and every day he raced and tore after the flies, so as to get back early ...
— Anthony Lyveden • Dornford Yates
... helped her out of the way of Champion were not in accordance with his words to-night, and that the dimly-realized kiss during her faintness was no imaginary one. But in the blissful circumstances of having Bob at hand again she took optimist views, and persuaded herself that John would soon begin to see her in the light ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... "We have been getting no pay these three weeks, but I doubt the officer will know what has become of the money." It is the firm conviction of every private soldier in "K(1)" that all fines and deductions go straight into the pocket of the officer who levies them. Private Hogg, always an optimist, opines: "The officers should know better how to treat us now, for they all get ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... be mentioned that England and France, at all events, were this year represented at the great fair of Nijni-Novgorod by two of the most distinguished products of modern civilization, Messrs. Harry Blount and Alcide Jolivet. Jolivet, an optimist by nature, found everything agreeable, and as by chance both lodging and food were to his taste, he jotted down in his book some memoranda particularly favorable to the town of Nijni-Novgorod. Blount, ...
— Michael Strogoff - or, The Courier of the Czar • Jules Verne
... a profound optimist, and apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said to ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... many disagreeable things in life which wise people say are good for us, and for which they tell us we ought to be grateful in proportion to our discomfort. For my own part, however, I am no optimist. I am not fond of mortifying the flesh, and the eloquence of Socrates would fail to persuade me that a carbuncle was a cheerful companion, or the gout an ailment to be ardently desired. Yet, for all this, I cannot say that I look upon your adventure in the light of a misfortune. You have ...
— In the Days of My Youth • Amelia Ann Blandford Edwards
... With others of the Lampton kin, he was already settled in Missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative, John Quarles, brother-in-law to Mrs. Clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted optimist, well-loved by all who ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... the day before. This was for the weakest spot in the financial dike. And with one bank president after another similar scenes were enacted. They were paralyzed with fear, and first of all he played his role of the big vital optimist. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... talking to an optimist, whose nerves have been getting shaky. We fancy that a straw vote of the rocking-chair fleet on a sanitarium porch would show a preponderance of optimists. What brought them there? Worry, which is brother to optimism. We ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... tradition by means of one shilling and sixpenny table d'hte luncheons. The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. On all these things the sun shone with a genial smile. Round the corner, in Shaftesbury Avenue, an east wind was doing its best to pierce the hardened hides of the citizenry; but it did not penetrate ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... they walked toward the tennis court he seemed to be plunged into mournful thought. In his eyes was a singular expression, which perhaps denoted the woe of the optimist pushed suddenly from its height. He sighed. "Oh, well, I suppose all women, even the best ...
— The Third Violet • Stephen Crane
... the river which fertilises the land. But, if he deprecated the pursuit of what he deemed the impossible, he condemned as criminal the neglect of the attainable. The charge of cynicism was unjust; Cavour was at heart an optimist; he never doubted that life was immensely worth living, that the fields open to human energy were splendid and beneficent. He hated shams, and he hated all forms of caste-feeling. He was one of the few continental statesmen who never exaggerated the power for good of government; ...
— Cavour • Countess Evelyn Martinengo-Cesaresco
... surprise At finding you, beneath your lion's skin, So sweet an optimist—whose faith can find All's for the best; and the best, this ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... religious essays, binds them up in a book, and calls it Seven Stormy Sundays. Mr. H. T. Tuckerman makes a book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is 'obvious.' An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience. Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous Poems, but ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... the thing was impossible. Why, then, did not Jane despair? For two reasons. In the first place, she was in love, and that made her an optimist. Somehow love would find the way. But the second reason—the one she hid from herself deep in the darkest sub-cellar of her mind, was the real reason. It is one matter to wish for a person's death. Only a villainous nature can harbor such a wish, can admit it except as a hastily and slyly ...
— The Conflict • David Graham Phillips
... 'You're a bun-headed old optimist,' said the Puddin' rudely. 'Puddin'-thieves never suffer from remorse. They only suffer from blighted ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... nice, quiet, gentlemanly little optimist, and I like you, old fellow," retorted Cullen. "But don't deceive yourself too much. Your Senator Langdon is personally one of the best ever. But he was born a mark, and a mark he'll be to the end ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... with the body. Thus was she punished for an infraction of the law. The next day the particulars were told me by the facetious Coroner himself, whose jury had just rendered a verdict of accidental drowning in both cases. I don't know when I have enjoyed a heartier laugh. The Optimist, ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... Wilbur. "Miss Brown, you're an optimist. But that's because you've never seen him ride. I consider it a good day's work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following and overtaking him—ha, ha, ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... noting how this optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles, which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doing justice. If one man is rewarded for a moderate amount of forethought by becoming a millionaire, and his unsuccessful rivals punished by starvation or the workhouse, the lottery of life is not arranged on principles of justice. A man must be a very determined optimist if he denied the painful truth to be found in such statements. He must be blind to many evils if he does not perceive the danger of dulling his sympathies by indifference to the fate of the unsuccessful. The ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... on his work. He is definitely "placed"; we know him for what he is—a romancer of a violent idealistic type masquerading as an implacable realist; a lyric pessimist at the beginning of his literary career, a sonorous optimist at the close, with vague socialistic views as to the perfectibility of the human race. But he traversed distances before he finally found himself a field in which stirred and struggled all human animality. And he was more Zola when ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... whether he felt more like laughing or crying. He was fairly close to home, anyhow. They did have space traffic here. And being pretty much of an optimist, he also decided that it was a time-track where he had been known. Only being so long overdue, he had probably been ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... work among this people, I am beginning to doubt the safety of my own soul. I am afraid the desires of Bro. Brown and his family are set too much on carnal things." A dyspeptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... the other qualities, and you will find you have become an optimist. Your self-confidence, too, will grow as fast as you increase your ability. When you are full of optimism and self-confidence, you will not find it difficult to create courage within yourself. Then ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... "You're such a fatuous optimist, Marcella," he said impatiently. "Lord, I wish I'd never started on this business! Everything's against us—I knew it would be! We'll give it up. You go off into the back blocks where you will at least be sure of food and ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... thought of discovering instincts and aptitudes of such a kind in this long-legged optimist?' The squire shrugged his shoulders as he thought of the attempt involved in such a personality to combine both worlds, the world of action and the world of thought. Absurd! Of course, ultimately one or other must ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... who was following them into the hall. 'Oh, I hate pessimists! What's the latest definition of them? Ah, I know; an optimist is a person who doesn't care what happens as long as it ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... he was never able to interest himself in private affairs. Many times he made the attempt to continue writing, but found it useless. Until then he had lived the life of a man in middle life—and a young one at that—golfing, fishing, swimming each day, sometimes doing all three in one day. Optimist as he always was and tried to be, even in the face of the failure of his hopes, the world disaster was too much. His heart was broken. A severe attack of influenza followed by two serious attacks of pneumonia ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... were Mr. Foster, the optimist, who believed in the improvement of mankind; Mr. Escot, the pessimist, who saw mankind constantly deteriorating; Mr. Jenkison, who thought things were very well as they were; and the Reverend Doctor Gaster, who, though neither ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Vol VII • Various
... optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath, strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed them of the hope which was but ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... friend at school to that of the man to whom she had given all her heart. In spite of the fact that she had been married a year and had taken her place in the comparatively small set which made up New York society, Mrs. Palgrave was an optimist. As a fiction-fed girl she had expected, with a thrill of excitement, that after marriage she would find herself in a whirlpool of careless and extravagant people who made their own elastic code of morals ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... for the time the weakness in his own camp, because he had no thought of betraying it to the enemy. He who considers such incidents (they are the common sands of life), and yet looks upon the natural heart of man as a very noble thing, would appear to be an optimist. ...
— What Necessity Knows • Lily Dougall
... these rodents were slung by the tail in the face of anyone who believed in "Long Cecil" (the gun had been so named out of compliment to Mr. Rhodes) was conclusive. Where was the necessary material to come from? Oh, De Beers had the material, the optimist would reply. But optimists, once so ubiquitous, were now as rare as radium. Our prophets had for their reputations' sake altered their tactics. Experience had taught them that the roseate view of things was the least likely to be sound, and they now revelled ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... a pessimist and an optimist, with ample opportunities to quarrel. Johnson is a jackass, but honest. He is a pessimist and has a pea-green liver. Listen to him and the business will die painlessly, by inches. Applerod is also a jackass, and I presume him to be honest; but I never tested it. He suffers from too ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... pocket and forthwith began to knit with bowed head. Fixing her eyes and concentrating her thoughts on a rag one foot square; it was impossible for conversation to rise above the wash-rag level! It was enough to make the most aged optimist 'solemn' to see such a wreck ...
— Eighty Years And More; Reminiscences 1815-1897 • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... getting them in the next life; and meanwhile are discontented with God's Providence, and talk of God's good world as if some fiend and not the Lord Jesus Christ was the maker and ruler thereof. Do not misunderstand me. I am no optimist. I know well that things happen in this world which must, which ought to make us sad—so sad that at moments we envy the dead, who are gone home to their rest; real tragedies, real griefs, divine and Christlike griefs, which only loving ...
— All Saints' Day and Other Sermons • Charles Kingsley
... Aldous insist on carrying his wife off to the dower house on the other side of the estate? or would they be content to stay in the old place with the old people? And if so, how were that girl and his sister to get on? As for himself, he was of a naturally optimist temper, and ever since the night of his first interview with Aldous on the subject, he had been more and more inclining to take a cheerful view. He liked to see a young creature of such evident character and cleverness holding opinions and lines of ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... that she is. The girl wasn't content to go into modest rooms—they must furnish a flat. I rather wonder he didn't start a carriage for her. Well, his next book brought only another hundred, and now, even if he finishes this one, it's very doubtful if he'll get as much. "The Optimist" was practically a failure.' ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... waiting for all this time. But, Monsignor, does my father exaggerate? For all this sounds too delightful to be true. Is it possible that his ideas meet with no opposition? Or is it that an opposition is preparing behind an ambuscade of goodwill? Father is such an optimist that any enthusiasm for his ideas convinces him that stupidity has ended in the world at last. But you will not be duped, Monsignor, for Rome is your native city, and his appointment of capelmeister is owing ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore
... optimist," said Rogers, laughing. "But because I called you a fish, I'll give you a bit of valuable advice. I can't see you scrap quite all your chances. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... glimpse of Hamlet's character here given: he had been something of an optimist; at least had known villainy only from books; at thirty years of age it is to him a discovery that a man may smile and be a villain! Then think of the shock of such discoveries as are here forced ...
— The Tragedie of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark - A Study with the Text of the Folio of 1623 • George MacDonald
... by step, buildings rose up, numbers increased, and distinctions were won, but behind all the outward success was the vitalising energy of the Headmaster, the inspiration of the optimist, ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... son, unrecognised, are rivals in love; the wife and mother, supposed to be dead, is discovered; the husband returns to her arms, and is reconciled to his son. It is the victory of nature and of innate goodness; comic intention and comic power are wholly absent. La Chausee's morals are those of an optimist; but those modern domestic tragedies, the ethics of which do not err by over-sanguine views of human nature, may trace their ...
— A History of French Literature - Short Histories of the Literatures of the World: II. • Edward Dowden
... obstacles in the way of His justice; to implore the assistance of God in our calamities, means to appeal to the very author of these calamities in order to represent to Him our welfare; that He ought to rectify in our favor His plan, which is not beneficial to our interests. The optimist, or the one who thinks that everything is good in the world, and who repeats to us incessantly that we live in the best world possible, if he were consistent, ought never to pray; still less should he expect another world where men will be happier. Can there be a better world than ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror, goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now and again, to ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition and ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... had stopped and he anticipated adventure. The idea of getting across the river in a goufa flashed across his mind, but a glance at the foaming, tearing water was sufficient deterrent even to an optimist like Brown. It might be done in daylight, but at night it ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... exuberance and self-restraint essential to the savoring of achievement or of any other pleasure. I believe that the successful invalid is more apt to be cynical about his success than the healthy failure about his failure. The latter is usually an optimist. But this is a hard belief to substantiate. For the perfectly healthy failure does not grow ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton from the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with plates of birnen-brod and eier-brod, kuechli and cheese and butter; and Georg stirred ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... views of flood or fire slightly lacking in reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of being burnt at Smithfield or having a toothache, is a positive thing; ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... come about the new birth of Art, and I think it WILL come about thus. You may say it is a long process, and so it is; but I can conceive of a longer. I have given you the Socialist or Optimist view of the matter. Now for ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... rubrication, and could see the cover through the wrapper of my sealed copy. The dark green morocco, I said, in summing up, typified the author's serious view of life, as a thing to be endured as patiently as might be. The cap-and-bells border was significant of the shams by which the optimist sought to delude himself into the view that life was a desirable thing. The intricate blind-tooling of the doublure shadowed forth the blind fate which left us in ignorance of our future and our past, or of even what ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... telephone mystery again—an alarming mystery. Elizabeth had not given her address to anyone: Fandor had been careful not to give it to a soul.... Clearly, this poor girl, even in the heart of this peaceful convent, was not secure from some unknown, outside interference; and Fandor, optimist though he was, could not help shuddering at the thought of these mysterious adversaries, implacable and formidable, who might work harm to this unfortunate girl, whose devoted protector he now was.... Besides ... did he not feel for Jacques Dollon's ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... born optimist," I commented idly. "Life is one long, glorious lark to him. I believe he would be happy if he knew raw, red mutiny were going to break ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... first, I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Government (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the "customs of matter") is wholly just. The more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... tottering feet. A sense as though of some fresh disaster was upon him. His heart was sinking, sinking within him. And yet none knew better than he that there was nothing fresh. It was merely that the scene had recalled to him anew some of those unpalatable truths which the optimist is always much ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Captain, who was an optimist—he even applied that theory to human nature—"I suppose it is all right now. Everybody knows now that you are among ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman |
