"Pessimism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... have dealt with the more depressing sides of practical life—the sudden tempest which sweeps down on the business man, or the long period of depression which is the necessary prelude to the times in which optimism is justified. But it is on the note of optimism, and not of pessimism, that I would conclude, and after the storm comes the calm. What is calm to the man of experience in affairs? It is the end to which turbulent and ambitious youth should devote itself in order that it may attain ...
— Success (Second Edition) • Max Aitken Beaverbrook
... that growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... their place and their duty are in the front line of struggling humanity, not in the unperturbed ranks of those who keep themselves aloof from life. If they are indifferent, or discouraged because they feel or think that they know that the situation is hopeless, it may be proved that undue pessimism is as dangerous a "religion" as any other blind creed. Indeed there is very little difference in kind between the medieval fanaticism of the "holy inquisition," and modern intolerance toward new ideas. All kinds of intellect must get together, ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... girl pondered as she lifted her hands to take off her hat. "I—don't know. It's such a pretty word, but it doesn't mean much these days—there aren't any!" She shrugged her shoulders with a petulant pessimism her youth made amusing. "Papa was the last of the kind—he's a love!—and you let mamma ...
— Quaint Courtships • Howells & Alden, Editors
... the only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, an economy of petty self-interests in stable equilibrium, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... the future, it seems that increased exploration, which is resulting from the present premium on gold, is likely to bring in new reserves to increase production. Because of lack of important discoveries in recent years, there is pessimism in some quarters as to the possibilities of large increase of production; but, considering the history of gold discoveries, and the amount of ground still to be explored both areally and vertically, this pessimism does not seem to be wholly justified from the geologic standpoint. ...
— The Economic Aspect of Geology • C. K. Leith
... fellow, she gained not the least consolation. That he loved her as she loved him, she had never cause to doubt. But in his self-renunciation he gave her advice that sprang out of his own sorrow and pessimism. It was no use, ran his letters, for a woman like her to try and battle against the evident decrees of Fortune. He was a man, and must fight his battle or die his death bravely; but she was not called on for this. There was no reason ...
— A Friend of Caesar - A Tale of the Fall of the Roman Republic. Time, 50-47 B.C. • William Stearns Davis
... but occasionally I have periods of wakefulness in the middle of the night. My sleep is then divided into two chapters, and between the chapters there is a slab of unmitigated dreariness. It is my hour of pessimism. The tide has ebbed, the water is dead-low, and there is a vista of endless mud. It is then that this tragi-comedy of life touches bottom, and I see the heavens all hung with black. I despair of humanity, ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... him from pessimism and rebuild within him a healthy appetite for life. If she did more than that, she did not know it then; for Ward Warren had learned, along with other hard lessons, the art of keeping his thoughts locked safely away, and of using his face as a mask to hide ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... the scenes and characters of Mr. Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees—I count myself among this tardy company—to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... gold, with blue topping all; of twinkling, fluent, tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining leaves; a sense of pert bird noises, and of a longer shadow than usual slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere. Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism might hope to flourish. ...
— The Line of Love - Dizain des Mariages • James Branch Cabell
... wears habitually a wavering self-conscious smile. This smile, as if everybody were looking at him, makes him remind one as he comes out of a Cabinet meeting of a small boy in a classroom carrying a bouquet of flowers up to his teacher. He has, moreover, a strain of pessimism in his nature, which may account for his indecision. You catch him in moods of profound depression. He was in one just before his appointment to the Cabinet, when his European relief work was not going to his liking, ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... "I and pessimism? Listen, heart of my heart, I have a new story for you." He moved closer to her, and put his arm round her neck. "There was once a ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not God's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making God Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions as have been ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... no one to stand for Catholic views in the various matters under discussion, can we be astonished that we are absolutely ignored, and our views not considered? "We believe that an attitude of merely destructive criticism, of aloofness, scepticism, pessimism, is a deplorable mistake. It is not by standing aloof from the movements of our day, but by going fearlessly into them with the message of truth entrusted to our charge, shall we best fulfil our ...
— Catholic Problems in Western Canada • George Thomas Daly
... not built for the father of a family. Moreover, I consider marriage a sin, and the begetting of children a crime." What of it? The power of natural instincts will restore the equilibrium. We are alarmed neither by a Humboldt's hostility to marriage nor by the philosophic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, a Mainlaender or a v. Hartmann, who raise to man the prospect of self-destruction in the "ideal State," In this matter we hold with Fr. ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... would never be known to the Official Receiver, came down to breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection. From the very first, somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true. All her life she had never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the passionate who at bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally restrained universe. But this did not make it any easier, on opening the morning paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed. ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... are that pessimism is her natural temperament, and that a natural outcome of her pessimism is the Indian doctrine of the transmigration of souls. The second statement will require explanation; but as regards the former, there is no denying the strain of melancholy, the note of hopelessness, that pervades ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... optimism. It is generally thought that the optimist must be shallow and superficial; whilst pessimism is associated with profound and sincere thinking. Browning felt this criticism, and replied to it with a scriptural insult in his poem At the Mermaid. I cannot possibly be a great poet, he said sneeringly, because I have never said I longed for death; I have enjoyed ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... prevent him from seeing in Nature nothing but harmony and peace. Rousseau had committed the error of excluding the beak-and-claw fight from his thoughts; and Huxley committed the opposite error; but neither Rousseau's optimism nor Huxley's pessimism can be accepted as ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... proclaiming Night and Sin's high noon; follow me and I will show you why I do not believe in "humanity" quite so implicitly as does Sir Edwin; why even Dr. Talmage has failed to wean me from "the awful sin of pessimism." It is not necessary to linger long in the low concert halls and brothels where girls scarce in their teens are made the prey of the rum-inflamed passions of brutes old enough to he their grandsires; where old roues, many of whose names ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... suffering, as Professor Huxley tells us, are always with us, and even increase in quantity and intensity as evolution advances. The fact had been recognised in remote ages long before theories of evolution had taken their modern form. Pessimism, from the time of the ancient Hindoo philosophers to the time of their disciple, Schopenhauer, has been in no want of evidence to support its melancholy conclusions. It would be idle to waste rhetoric in the attempt to recapitulate so familiar a position. Though ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... and when a certain fashion of thinking robs us of confidence, cheerfulness and strength, we should reject that, certain not only that it is a nutriment noxious to the mind, but also that it is false. There is no truth for man but in thoughts that are human, and pessimism is inhuman. Besides, it wants as much in modesty as in logic. To permit one's self to count as evil this prodigious thing that we call life, one needs have seen its very foundation, almost to have made it. What a strange attitude is that of certain great thinkers ...
— The Simple Life • Charles Wagner
... buildings aspiring to blue skies restore the throbbing optimism which with us is normal; and it was with an effort, when I talked to the reporters on landing, that I was able to achieve and express the pessimism and darkness out of which I had come. Pessimism is perhaps too strong a word, and takes no account of the continued unimpaired morale and determination of the greater part of the British and French peoples. They expect much from us. Yet the impression was instantaneous, ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the family, and recognizes an overruling Providence ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... "keen-witted pessimist out and out," the Reverend Dr. Abbott's "horrid example" has shown me the following sentence:—"Pessimism is as little consonant with the facts of sentient existence as optimism." He says he published it in 1888, in an article on "Industrial Development," to be seen in the "Nineteenth Century". But no doubt ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... of all beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain. Schopenhauer is an enemy to the race. Even if he earnestly believed that this is the most ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... interest in mundane affairs, their social aspirations and worldly ambitions, at length made her quite unwelcome—Carmen steadily, and without heed of diverting gesture, brought into captivity every thought to the obedience of her Christ-principle, and threw off for all time the dark cloud of pessimism which human belief and the mesmerism of events had drawn over ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... though immeasurably preferring the pantheism of Goethe, or of Renan (without his pessimism), to the anthropomorphic God of the Israelites, or of their theosophic legatees, the Christians, however inconsistent, I still believe in prayer. I should not pray that I may not die 'for want of breath'; nor for rain, while 'the wind was in the wrong quarter.' My prayers would not be ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... which included the purchase of land and other arrangements for the establishment of suitable British settlers on farms in both colonies. The debate on the vote afforded a significant exhibition of the spirit of mingled pessimism and distrust in which the Liberal Opposition approached every aspect of the South African question. The idea of the Transvaal ever being able to repay this grant-in-aid out of the "hypothetical" development loan appeared ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... this bad universe produce an amount of justice and truth and love to be used as a measuring-rod in order to find out whether it will correspond with these ideals or not? That one question seems to me enough to turn pessimism ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... His pessimism caused him to reflect upon his present condition. All was lost! He was unfitted for the conduct of a small business, for the petty transactions and details which might suffice for one of meager wants. He would renounce the idea of that marriage which ...
— The Dead Command - From the Spanish Los Muertos Mandan • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... suggest that the new Board of Admiralty was so content with what had been done by "my right hon. and learned—I beg his pardon—gallant friend" that it had adopted a policy of "rest and be thankful". But there was no justification for "a certain kind of sub-acid pessimism that sometimes reaches my ears", and he must be a poor-spirited creature who, having been happy about the Navy in August, 1914, could be depressed about in ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, March 15, 1916 • Various
... no account of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop, the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it implied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether it is the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be that of a ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... muddy," retorted Joey with dogged pessimism. They trooped off after him, each one lighter hearted in spite of a dull reluctance, simply because Colonel Grand had brought not only the sunshine but a ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... call pessimism," Lorne rejoined. "I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world. and ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... pessimism seemed to be fully justified when, on the following day, the pair were once more released from the chains that confined them to the wall, and were summoned by their jailer to follow him. They obeyed the summons with alacrity, each of them animated by a secret ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... 'em belong when it comes to a woman like Annabel," said Persis with unwonted pessimism. "And Thad's just young enough to be proud of having that sort of acquaintance with a married woman. Men are queer cattle, Mis' West. The worst woman living likes to pretend to herself that she's as ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... Mrs. Robson was unsympathetic; brought face to face with suffering, she blossomed with every impulsive tenderness, but her experiences had confirmed her in pessimism, and every fresh tragedy testified to the soundness of her faith. Her pride at diagnosing people's ills and pronouncing their death-sentences was almost professional. And she had an irritating way of making comments ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... where no one knows, or can know, and so everyone is free to please his own fancy in choosing a cloak for his ignorance. Some of the doctors declared kidneys sound but liver suspicious; others exonerated liver but condemned one or both kidneys; others viewed kidneys and liver with equal pessimism; still others put those organs aside and shook their heads and unlimbered their Latin at spleen and pancreas. In one respect, however, the eight narrowed to two groups. "Let's figure it out trial-balance ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... less terrible for being without experience to justify it,—that melancholy we are too apt to look back upon with cynical jeers and laughter in middle age,—is more potent than we dare to think, and it was in no mere pose of youthful pessimism that Randolph Trent now contemplated suicide. Such scraps of philosophy as his education had given him pointed to that one conclusion. And it was the only refuge that pride—real or false—offered him from the one supreme ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... Umbrian reformer Italy roused herself, recovered her good sense and fine temper; she cast out those doctrines of pessimism and death, as a robust organism casts ...
— Life of St. Francis of Assisi • Paul Sabatier
... has endeavored first of all to define carefully the distinction between pessimism and Weltschmerz; then to classify the latter, both as to its origin and its forms of expression, and to indicate briefly its relation to mental pathology and to contemporary social and political conditions. ...
— Types of Weltschmerz in German Poetry • Wilhelm Alfred Braun
... third answer would seem the plain one: something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... to the future and speculate as to what his present life would lead to. His cogitations seem to have ended, almost invariably, in a gloomy mist of pessimism and despair—in other words, an attack of the "Horrors." If Mr Petulengro were encamped upon Mousehold, the antidote lay near to hand in his friend's pagan optimism; if, on the other hand, the tents of Egypt were pitched on other soil, there was ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... not whether we share this pessimism, nor what we may have to say pro or con this question of "progress" or "retrogression" in eating (or in anything else for that matter). In fact we are not concerned with the question here more than to ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... fallen a little when he learned that Horace had not returned, still looked brighter than before. While Sidney Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism. Meeks was as pessimistic in his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret conviction that when he seemed to be on the opposite side yet he was in ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the alternatives are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment, the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... and kindness, I name no names. But as for myself, that I am young I acknowledge. Those whom the gods love are ever young. Yet I am old enough, at least, to be capable of fresh, impulsive feelings. I am old enough to have cast the crude, harsh pessimism of inexperience. I am old enough to have outlived my disillusions. I am old enough to have learned that the good things of life are good, and to understand that the rose-buds in the garden are there to be gathered. And I 'm not such a silly as to forbear to gather them. I think I shall make Madame ...
— The Lady Paramount • Henry Harland
... erudite, witty challenges to illusion, deriving primarily from Hartmann and Schopenhauer but enriching their arguments with much inquisitive learning in current French philosophers and poets. Erudition, however, was not Saltus's sole equipment: his pessimism came, in part, from his literary masters but in part also from a temperament which steadily followed its own impulses and arrived at its own destinations. Cynical, deracinated, he turned from his speculative doubts to the positive realities of sense, becoming the historian of love and loveliness ...
— Contemporary American Novelists (1900-1920) • Carl Van Doren
... early essays and from Sartor Resartus is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men 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 {454} 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 ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... much critical facility, finds the cause of Conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life—his double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been back to Poland, and he is free to ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... begin at the beginning. We must do something entirely new and revolutionary. We must rely upon our free souls to see and to do the right, as it has never been seen or done before. Some such declaration of independence, some such combination of hopeless pessimism about all that has been done, with confident optimism about what is just to be done, one finds in men of every art, craft, and calling. We are to have perpetual motion. We are to square the circle. We are to abandon our present political and religious and educational institutions ...
— Modern American Prose Selections • Various
... was a great failure, and that failure had been brought home to her mind in a mercilessly short space of time; but of what use to bewail it? She was not yet conquered. The bitterness of spirit which she carried about with her took the form of a scoffing pessimism. A hard laugh at the things which made other people shake their heads and uplift their hands; a ready scoff at all tenderness; a sneer at anything which could by any stretch of imagination be called good; a determined running up of what was hard, sordid, and ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... respect and others, a curious pendant to Bel-Ami. It illustrates another side of Maupassant's pessimism—the overtly, but for the most part quietly, tragic. It might almost (borrowing a second title from the Index) call itself "Jeanne; ou Les Malheurs de la Vertu." The heroine is perfectly innocent, though both a femmelette and a fool. She never ...
— A History of the French Novel, Vol. 2 - To the Close of the 19th Century • George Saintsbury
... than others to colours or sounds, to moral or intellectual issues. This is curiously illustrated in their treatment of tragic themes. There is no want of tragedy in Homer or the dramatists—their view of life is probably darker than our own—and they have been praised for a pessimism that faced and admitted the black truth. Yet the cloud of evil is continually broken by rays of beauty. Thus Homer lights up the tragic parting of Hector and Andromache by the story of the child and the nodding plumes, ...
— The Legacy of Greece • Various
... types of young men pause and consider seriously the impossibility of adjusting a small salary to the ideas of their women friends as to what is the minimum of a family budget. Add to such facts a growing pessimism of young men regarding inconstant affections of wives with children, and the need of special ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... distress and dirt, of official, social, and moral degradation as they lived when the Westerner remained still in the primeval forest stage. But despite the scepticism and the cynicism of certain writers, whose pessimism is due to a lack of foresight, and despite the fact that she is being constantly accused of having in the past ignominiously failed at the crucial moment in endeavors towards minor reforms, I am one of those who believe that in ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... made this outline of our negro problem in no spirit of pessimism or of prejudice, but in the belief that the only way to remedy an evil or a difficulty is candidly and fundamentally to understand it. Two things are evident: First, the negro population is certain to increase in the United States, ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... "General History of the Stage" gives us many a charming glimpse of dead and gone actors. Dead and gone? Nay, rather let it be said that they still live in the ever fresh and graphic pages of contemporary critics, and thus refute the gentle pessimism of Mr. Henley when ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... Monarchy, which were those of Balzac's mature activity, contrasted sharply with those that immediately preceded. In spite of perceptible social progress, the constant war of political parties, in which the throne itself was attacked, alarmed lovers of order, and engendered feelings of pessimism. The power of journalism waxed great. Fighting with the pen was carried to a point of skill previously unattained. Grouped round the Debats—the ministerial organ—were Silvestre de Sacy, Saint-Marc ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... wide mirror Perry tried on the head and turned from side to side appraisingly. In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel's face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels—in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed—but distinctive he certainly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... knocks of fate. Nowadays we do not care greatly for the victory, and we go out to fight with a light heart, commencing where Wagner and all the pessimists ended. Wagner wanted the victory, and also, lest he should not gain it, he wanted something to save him from despair. That something he found in pessimism. In his younger days—indeed until near the last—he forgot all about it in his hours of inspiration, and worked for no end, but for the sheer joy of working. But towards the end of his life, when his inspiration came seldomer and with less power, he worked more and ...
— Old Scores and New Readings • John F. Runciman
... anon breaking off to conjecture on the nature of the welcome they might reasonably expect to receive; and when he spoke, as he did frequently, of his son-in-law, his prognostications, in striking contrast with his former pessimism, were couched in the most ...
— Afterwards • Kathlyn Rhodes
... the polygot pilgrims gather most densely; Piazza San Marco is the lobby of the opera in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of ricordi. The ricordi that we prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides—best of all on the noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement at the railway station. It is, however, ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... remind you of how large importance this knowledge of and constant reference to the measureless power manifested in Christ is for us. I believe there can be no vigorous, happy Christian life without it. It is our only refuge from pessimism and despair for the world. The old psalm said, 'Thou hast crowned Him with glory and honour, and hast given Him dominion over the works of Thy hands,' and hundreds of years afterwards the writer of the Epistle ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ephesians; Epistles of St. Peter and St. John • Alexander Maclaren
... is the great lesson which Martian civilisation teaches us. Surely it affords no reason for the depression and pessimism in which some upon the earth are so prone to indulge; but rather should it stir them to a more earnest endeavour, by gradually removing the obstacles which now bar their progress, to improve the social conditions of the people; so that they ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... street, thanks largely to Hindenburg, regards the military situation with optimism, he sees no grounds for pessimism in the present political situation. Italy and Bulgaria ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... of her Majesty the Queen; (12) the union of all Christian Churches; (13) the impossibility of such union ever becoming permanent; (14) the value of Holy Scripture in daily life; (15) his firm belief in the achievement of England's greatness by means of the open Bible; (16) the note of pessimism in modern life; (17) the necessity for the Church's combating modern pessimism; (18) the Church's position as a purveyor of healthy literature for the young; (19) his reluctance to take up any more of their valuable time, and (20) his assurance that the remarks of their spokesman ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... Hal divined from her aspect and manner that she had sunk back into her old mood of pessimism. He felt a momentary resentment. He was so thrilled with this adventure; he wanted everybody else to be thrilled—especially Mary! Like every one who has not suffered much, he was repelled by a condition of perpetual suffering in another. Of ...
— King Coal - A Novel • Upton Sinclair
... what is vaguely called nervous breakdown; it was too clear that Mr. Newthorpe must count upon very moderate activity either of mind or body henceforth. He himself was not quite unprepared for this collapse; he accepted it with genial pessimism. Fate had said that his life was to result in nothing—nothing, that is, from the point of view of his early aspirations. Yet there was Annabel, and in her the memory of his life's passion. As he lay in silence through the days when ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... "the Gloomy Dean" a great injustice was done him. He had appeared as the champion of our capitalist community against the forces of revolt; and any one who does that exceeds in optimism rather than pessimism. A man who really thinks that strikers have suffered no wrong, or that employers have done no wrong—such a man is not a Gloomy Dean, but a quite wildly and dangerously happy Dean. A man who can feel satisfied with modern industrialism ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... first spoke the ancient proverb, Let sleeping dogs lie, did no more than voice the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented the saying that the world is going to the bow-wows, lodged his deplorable pessimism in fitting words. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... of that equipoise so necessary for a well-balanced manhood. And it told him all that, and forced conviction upon him. It told him so much of that which no man should believe until it be thrust upon him overwhelmingly by the bitter experiences of life. His whole brain was permeated by a pessimism forced upon him by a morbid introspection, resulting from an undue appreciation of his own physical ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... came to be Written Thomas Tyler Frank Harris Harris "durch Mitleid wissend" "Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother" Shakespear's Social Standing This Side Idolatry Shakespear's Pessimism Gaiety of Genius Jupiter and Semele The Idol of the Bardolaters Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion Shakespear and Democracy Shakespear and the British Public The ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... younger barristers against their characteristic faults of self-sufficiency and affected pessimism, the preacher turns to another aspect of the advocate's duty ...
— Sydney Smith • George W. E. Russell
... that tendency which has been adorned or rather branded successively with the names of hypochondria, pessimism, and lastly neurasthenia, an appellation which comprises all kinds of nervous diseases, the characteristic ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... deeply beneath any possible standard, that on a retrospect I wonder I have been able to endure them myself until the yarn was finished. Well, there is always one thing; it will serve as a touchstone. If the admirers of Zola admire him for his pertinent ugliness and pessimism, I think they should admire this; but if, as I have long suspected, they neither admire nor understand the man's art, and only wallow in his rancidness like a hound in offal, then they will certainly be disappointed in The Ebb Tide. Alas! poor little tale, ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition Vol. 25 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... not knowing how to live till you're through living—and THEN maybe not!" he said, chuckling at his own determined pessimism. "I see I'm pretty old because I talk this way—I remember my grandmother saying things a good deal like all what I'm saying now; I used to hear her at it when I was a young fellow—she was a right gloomy old lady, I remember. Well, ...
— Alice Adams • Booth Tarkington
... author's style of feeling and expression. What he has done, has been performed faithfully. It is worth remarking that he was attracted by the intense longing of the poet for love and appreciation, and by keen sympathy with his unhappy condition. It is needless to say that he did not share the pessimism that imparts a melancholy hue to the philosopher's own doctrine, and that might have been modified if not dispelled by a different experience. The translation was finished at Siena, the summer of the earthquake, and was the last work Mr. Townsend ever ...
— The Poems of Giacomo Leopardi • Giacomo Leopardi
... only relief possible. To the Hindu the question so often discussed in Christian lands—"Is life worth living?"—has no interest, since it has but one answer possible. And even if the Indian sage forgets his present conditions and pessimism long enough to gaze down the long and dismal vista of numberless births to the final consummation (Sayujya)—the final union with God—he finds in that nothing which the Christian does not discover in tenfold richness ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... warmest welcome of their lives if they had been there. The coward, being a quartermaster and the assigned head of the boat, sat in the stern and steered. He was terrified, and the women had to fight against his pessimism while they tugged ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... smiler at the answers she received. I daresay she used to ask questions—without result—long before she could talk, but I am quite sure she was not embittered by the lack of result. Nothing ever embittered Jay, not even her own pessimism. There is a finality about bitterness, and Jay was never final. Her last word was always on a questioning note. Her mind was always open, waiting for more. "Oh no," she would tell her pillow at night, "there must be a better answer ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... 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 that have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as a chase in ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... thirty years, with the application of sincere sympathy as one of the possible solvents of the mystery of misery, it is strange that this book should have passed from the minds of men. The book is a true satire. That is to say its irony is excited for the benefit of mankind. The pessimism of the story, its note of despair, is in reality, a summons to man to do better by his brother. Underlying its bitterness there is such a gentleness of heart as ...
— Volume 10 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... come; so uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism which the doctrine inspired.] ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... a development of that which the Iranian cosmology has to tell about the battles between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman). The Iranian optimism has been replaced here by a strong pessimism. This material world is no longer, as in Zoroastrianism, essentially a creation of the good God, but the powers of evil have created it with the aid of some stolen portions of light. This is practically the transference of Iranian ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... highly artificial individual dramatist of that school. I call it the strictly logical school of dramatic construction. I use the word 'artificial' in its more artistic sense, as opposed to the so-called natural school. His subjects of course were national, and not French. Whether his pessimism was national or personal, I have not been able to discover. It seemed to me that he was a pessimistic man dealing with a nation inclined to pessimism, but that had nothing to do with the technical qualities of ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... for pretending that all is well with the Balkan League. Even in official quarters, where pessimism is generally discouraged, it is no longer denied that relations between the Allies have reached a critical stage.... It would form a sad epilogue to a noble story if what began as a crusade of liberation were to end in fratricidal strife.... Nominally, ...
— Bulgaria • Frank Fox
... alone is sufficient to wreck the soul, fluttering about without rudder or ballast on the waves of the world. Duality is the root, out of which alone, for mortals, happiness can spring. And the old Hindoo mythology, which is far deeper in its simplicity than the later idealistic pessimism, expresses this beautifully by giving to every god his other half; the supreme instance of which dualism is the divine Pair, the Moony-crested god and his inseparable other half, the Daughter of the Snow: so ...
— The Substance of a Dream • F. W. Bain
... any conception. One reason why such bold thought has been subdued is that he has always felt according to tradition, the existence of superior supernatural (and with them patrician) beings, by whose power and patronage he has been effectively restrained or kept under. Hence gloom and pessimism, doubt and despair. It may seem a bold thing to say that it did not occur to any philosopher through the ages that man, resolute and noble and free, might will himself into a stage of mind defying devils and phantasms, ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... cold. At that moment she probably exaggerated in her mind the effect of her appearance. She plunged down into pessimism about herself. A sort of desperation came upon her. Underneath all her conquering charm, hidden away like a trembling bird under depths of green leaves, there was a secret diffidence of which she had occasionally been conscious during her life. It had no doubt been born with ...
— December Love • Robert Hichens
... for law, medicine, and theology, but for business, agriculture, engineering, and teaching, all bear testimony to the real interests of American democracy. The ideal was as yet far removed from the fact, and the intellectual leaders of the United States were yet to pass through a period of black pessimism, but the people were still firm in their faith that education is the mainstay of popular government, and gave their ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... was magnanimous; he forbore to whisper one word in reminder of the old-time pessimism that twenty years ago held the small-headed man of ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... characterized history as both the background and the key to all knowledge. No other class of reading so much as this helps one to appreciate his own country, his own age, his own surroundings. Extensive reading of history is a sure remedy for pessimism, prejudice, and fanaticism. In so far as history is an accurate account of the past, it is a true prophecy of the future for the nation and for the individual. Who reads history knows that men always have displayed folly, Weakness, ...
— Questionable Amusements and Worthy Substitutes • J. M. Judy
... faith that "God takes care of children, fools, and the United States." Until within a few years probably not one in a hundred of our population has ever questioned the security of our future. Such optimism is as senseless as pessimism is faithless. The one is as foolish as ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... and time, from whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... is that, as a civilization, we are less sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full record. This is not pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy, machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to us. All these things are more likely to be good ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... assured success, the certainty of a rich inheritance laid up for him and his children's children in the internal resources of his country. In many an Englishman's ears sound only the doleful croakings of the prophets, the sinister rumblings of approaching doom. Though his pessimism be in great part born of his climate, it has had a very real effect upon his statecraft. It has driven him outward to find hope and sunshine abroad, in his colonies, and in India. It has made of the race a nation of expansionists, reaping where they ...
— The Onlooker, Volume 1, Part 2 • Various
... pointed out, on 29th November, that if the war were continued the gain of a month or two was a trifling object; whereas, if the Allies ended the war, France would certainly offer Hanover to Prussia.[747] The dash of pessimism in Canning's nature enabled him to discern difficulties and dangers which were hidden from Pitt's ever hopeful vision. Mulgrave seems to have shared Pitt's view; for he signed all the despatches relating to the Hanoverian expedition. ...
— William Pitt and the Great War • John Holland Rose
... this Hispano-Filipino Association gave a largely attended banquet at which there were many prominent speakers. Rizal stayed away, not because of growing pessimism, as Retana suggests, but because one of the speakers was the same Becerra who had feared to act when the outrage against the body of Rizal's brother-in-law had been reported to him. Now out of office, the ex-minister was again bold in words, but Rizal for one was ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... he told himself after a while. And the thought brightened his outlook upon life, and helped to banish some of his pessimism. ...
— The Golden Woman - A Story of the Montana Hills • Ridgwell Cullum
... of theological doctrine that has come most to the front of late is the question of the Divine goodness, as shown in the plan of the universe. Speculations are divided between optimism and pessimism. How shall we decide between these extremes, or, if repudiating both, how shall we fix the mean? Is a metaphysician more especially qualified to find out the truth? I hardly think so. I believe he could contribute, ...
— Practical Essays • Alexander Bain
... roads? The religious question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms—nay, in the ignoblest form of a fashion—have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day would have followed the ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... objective fashion must not, when looking back from to-day, relegate all that has since happened to former discernible facts, but should consider that, in spite of all pessimism and all fears, the hopes of a reasonable peace of understanding, even though involving sacrifices, still existed, and that it was impossible to plunge the Monarchy into a catastrophe at once for fear of ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... so dark in here as 'tis down in Smeltses," she bragged to Fidy, who viewed her efforts with pessimism. "Once last summer the sun come in here fer purty near a week. It shined down the shaft. You ast Lobelia ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... later a newspaper came into Mayo's hands at Maquoit, and he read that the wrecked steamer had been put up at auction by the underwriters. It was plain that the bidders had shared the insurance folks' general feeling of pessimism—she had been knocked down for two thousand five hundred dollars. The newspapers explained that only this ridiculous sum had been realized because experts had decided that in the first blow the steamer would slip off the ledges on which she was impaled and would go down like a plummet in the deep ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... charge of pessimism often made against Tchaikowsky, he was a thinker, an explorer into the mysteries of human aspiration and disappointment,[307] and his music seems weighted down with the riddle of the universe. This introspective dejection, however, is a natural result of his temperament and his ...
— Music: An Art and a Language • Walter Raymond Spalding
... until the piece was finished before they learned what finally became of Lyddy Brown after she drove her husband ou' doors, or of Bill Harmon's bull terrier, who set an entire community quarreling among themselves. His racy accounts of Mrs. Popham's pessimism, which had grown prodigiously from living in the house with his optimism; his anecdotes of Lallie Joy Popham, who was given to moods, having inherited portions of her father's incurable hopefulness, and fragments of her mother's ineradicable gloom,—these were of a character that made the ...
— Mother Carey's Chickens • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... of Enoch Peake's?" he asked, hoping and fearing, really anxious for his son. He defended himself against probable disappointment by preparing to lapse into savage paternal pessimism and disgust at the futility of an offspring ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... were contained in his Elia essay "New Year's Eve," in the London Magazine for January, 1821. There is no evidence that Campbell disapproved of the essay. Canon Ainger suggests that Lamb may have thus alluded playfully to the pessimism of his remarks, so opposed to the pleasures of hope. When the Quarterly did "come in," in 1823, it was with cold words, ...
— The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb (Vol. 6) - Letters 1821-1842 • Charles and Mary Lamb
... school for the instruction of mothers. She often had heard her father say that a good mother was an exception. She had not believed him—had taken it for granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism. But since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the Children's Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to tell him that she was beginning to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... made; and in the mean time let us keep our latest vintages in the vat till we have some vessel proof against their fermentation. I know that the hope of any such vessel is usually mocked as mere optimism, but I think optimism is as wise and true as pessimism, or is at least as well founded; and since the one can no more establish itself as final truth than the other, it is better to have optimism. That was always the philosophy of the Easy Chair, and I do not know why that should be changed. ...
— Imaginary Interviews • W. D. Howells
... disturb or strain our own sickly mood by giving kindly sympathy to the happy, thus doubling their joy, or by showing compassion for the sad, thus halving their sorrow. We refuse to find delight in holy things, and let the mind brood in sad pessimism on unholy things. All these evil psychic moods must be conquered by strong effort of will. This rending of the veils will reveal to us something of the grace and peace which are of the interior ...
— The Yoga Sutras of Patanjali • Charles Johnston
... long talk after that, and he told me fully what shape his thoughts had been taking. It was that same story, which so many people have been telling of late years, of sneering pessimism as to the human race and its possibilities, and of contempt for the labors and rewards of life. We argued the matter for hours, and each one of us convinced himself that the other ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... malaria passes, but in long years after it returns anew and devouring the red blood, it breaks down a man's cheerfulness; a night in a miasmic forest may make him for ever a slave in a dismal swamp of pessimism. It is so with starvation, and all things physical. It is so with things mental, with degradations, with desolation; the scars and more than scars remain: there is outward healing, it may be, but we ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... I understand that you can't believe in pessimism and love at the same time. Wouldn't you feel unhappy if you lost ...
— The Pit • Frank Norris
... which men hurry wildly about in a mad activity which they mistake for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wistfully back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young' and could express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection. The exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by his own statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... extent is progress as a process of realizing values a matter of temperament, of optimism, and of pessimism? ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... disease which became so familiar some hundred years ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... this, Nietzsche is supposed to have been thinking of the island of Ischia which was ultimately destroyed by an earthquake. His teaching here is quite clear. He was among the first thinkers of Europe to overcome the pessimism which godlessness generally brings in its wake. He points to creating as the surest salvation from the suffering which is a concomitant of all higher life. "What would there be to create," he asks, "if there were—Gods?" His ideal, the Superman, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... news of the Belmont battle. The Belmont battle was a stale story when the Modder River fight was fresh, and the latter was now in all conscience stale enough. Of Magersfontein, not a word. This reticence in regard to Magersfontein intensified our curiosity; it was the parent of a pessimism that was to thrive. Common sense and the dictates of reason would clamour for recognition. Between the struggle at Modder River and the publication of its result there had been no interval to speak of. The fight of Belmont had occasioned no departure from the exercise of the "new diplomacy." ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That frame of mind is not the proper ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... must from time to time, in his own interest, be reexamined for signs of recurrence, and perhaps from time to time reinforce his immunity by a course of rubs or a few mercurial injections. Such a statement is not pessimism, but merely the same deliberate recognition of the fallibility of human judgment and the uncertainty of life which we show when we sleep out-of-doors after we have been suspected of having tuberculosis, or when we take out ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... contentment which accepts the fact that there is a chain of causes linked to effects by an invincible necessity; and that whatever is, could not have wisely been but so. And if this was fatalism, it was at least a brighter thing than the languid pessimism, which would have led her life among quicksands, to end ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... read: "Nothing could happen to him unless what happens to all—failure and death." His heroes are failures, as are heroes in all great poetry and fiction, and their failure is recorded with muffled irony. The fundamental pessimism of the Slavic temperament must be reckoned with. But this pessimism is implied, and life has its large as well as its "little ironies." In Chance, which describes the hypertrophy of a dolorous soul, ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... pagan had disappeared in the psychic! Cecil Grimshaw's melancholy and pessimism, his love of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished! Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian. Cecil Grimshaw never had been. Grimshaw had revolted against ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art. Pierre ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... horrible, senseless nightmare, as it really appeared to him. His work as a correspondent emphasised for him the accumulated miseries of thousands rather than any individual's share, and his point of view is as remorselessly gloomy as can be imagined. He is detailed in disgust; he is passionate in pessimism. He presents not only the soldier's distaste for trenches and machine guns, and his desire for the things of familiar life, but also, with surprising vehemence, his hatred of generals who give blundering orders ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 5, 1920 • Various
... that the ideals of Eugenics may be expected to work fruitfully. To insist upon the power of heredity was once considered to indicate a fatalistic pessimism. It wears a very different aspect nowadays, in the light of Eugenics. "To the eugenist," as Davenport observes, "heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race: its saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality."[40] We cannot, indeed, desire any compulsory elimination of the unfit ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems a ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... adjusted her spectacles as though they were the black cap of condemnation. "I hardly see," she interposed, "how a book steeped in the bitterest pessimism can be said to elevate ...
— Xingu - 1916 • Edith Wharton
... estimate of humanity, that he may have mistrusted its disinterestedness, contested the quality of its virtue, is possible, even certain. But that he was not personally superior to his heroes I am unwilling to admit. And if I see in his attitude, as in his language, an evidence of his inveterate pessimism, I see in it also a method of protecting his secret thoughts from ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily. This is better treatment than The Lily and the Bee gets ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Schopenhauer? I mean anything beyond the current misconceptions? I have been making his acquaintance lately. He is an agreeable rattle of a pessimist; his essay on 'The Misery of Mankind' is quite lively reading. At first his assimilation of Christianity and Pessimism (it occurs in his essay on 'Suicide') dazzled me as an audacious paradox. But there is truth in it. Verily the whole creation groaneth and travaileth, and man is a degraded monster, and sin is over ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... of thought logically resulted also in a kind of pessimism. He seemed at times to despise human nature. Somewhere about 1860 he wrote to a friend, "There is not one man in twenty that is worth the ground he stands on"; and speaking of Napoleon he affirms that, in the well-nigh universal negligence and inefficiency of mankind, ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... upon the side which we wish to prevail. The truth is far darker, far sterner, far more mysterious. The darkness is his not less than the light; selfishness and sin are the work of his hand, as much as unselfishness and holiness. To call this attitude of mind pessimism, and to say that it can only end in acquiescence or despair, is a sin against truth. A creed that does not take this thought into account is nothing but a delusion, with which we try to beguile the seriousness of the truth which we dread; but such a stern belief ...
— The Thread of Gold • Arthur Christopher Benson
... remained for a long time inexplicable in her father's attitude towards life. He seemed to regret nothing, not even the death of his elder son, nor his estrangement from Vickers, and he had little of the old man's pessimism. There were certain modern manifestations that she knew he disliked; but he seemed to have a fine tolerance even for them, as being of no special concern to him. He had lived his life, such as it was, without swerving, without doubts or hesitations, which ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... Miss Bathgate fiercely, forgetting all about her former pessimism as to Jean's chance of getting a man, and desiring greatly to champion her cause. "D'ye think Miss Jean's sitting here waitin' to jump at a man like a cock at a grossit? Na! He'll be a lucky man that gets her, and weel his lordship kens it. She's no pented ...
— Penny Plain • Anna Buchan (writing as O. Douglas)
... correspondent about the fear that America is soon to be an active source of danger in the Far East are not confined to persons on foreign shores. The prevailing attitude in some circles of American opinion is that called by President Hibben cynical pessimism. All professed radicals and many liberals believe that if our course has been better in the past it has been due to geographical accidents combined with indifference and with our undeveloped economic status. Consequently they believe ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... pessimism of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is about to give way to the enthusiasm of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... was large, filled with grass-plots and gravel walks; but it was shut in by a boarding so tall that the street could not be seen from the windows of the lower floor. To Johnnie, weary to the point where aching muscles and blood charged with uneliminated waste spelled pessimism, that high board fence seemed to make of the pretty place a ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... disillusioned by his stay in the fashionable art-world of Amsterdam. Some of his idols had crumbled, and there came into his spirit a goodly dash of pessimism. His father was disappointed and suggested that he get a place as illustrator at the bookmakers, before some one else stepped ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 4 (of 14) - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Painters • Elbert Hubbard
... [Footnote 140: Optimism and Pessimism. The meanings of these two opposites are readily made out from the Latin words from which ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... of attracting people. Few could resist the influence of her personality. Added to this she talked cleverly, and even brilliantly. The tone of her conversation was at times acrid and gloomy. Long years of toil in a hard, unjust world had borne the fruit of pessimism. She was too apt to overlook the bright for the dark side of a picture. But this was a fault which was amply counterbalanced by her talents. For the first time she made friends who were competent to justly measure her merits. She was recognized to be a woman of more than ordinary ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... ironical humour (indicating some yet unconquered province of the soul) that guards and embalms the purer strength of feeling, keeps it airy and spiritual, and frees it from moan and heaviness. Here we have no insistance on suffering, no literary heart-breaks, no dilettante pessimism; but those indefinable harmonies of freedom and law, of the ascendency of the soul and the sovereignty of fate, of Nature and the spaces of the mind, that in the works of the great masters represent, if they do not explain, the mystery ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... dream and asked him to give her name to Isabel, there was still the world. Though Jenny might understand, the world would think he had forgotten Jenny. The minority of faithful hearts would grow sadder by his seeming apostasy, and the cynic would strengthen his pessimism by one more illustration of human inconstancy. The world might hear that he was loving Isabel in some Aegean isle, and still deem him faithful; for grief is allowed mistresses, but with a wife it ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... the facts with all their consequences, whatever these may be and whatever they may involve for the proudest aspirations of mankind—only thus can truth be attained. And lest any should say that we preach an unrelieved pessimism, let us remind such that Knowledge is not after all the source of Life, that another category and a different principle—that, namely, which we indicate under the term Love-divine—must have generated the potent current of Life, and that ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... Deptford and in North Shields can escape from the inferno of life. He was a close observer of nature and of men. In his pictures of life in the depths he was a grim and uncompromising realist, who, however, was kept from pessimism by his faith in good women and his knowledge of worse men in the past than even "the Squire" and the valet-keeping ...
— Side Lights • James Runciman
... suggest eternal youth, as they fill the room with perfume, tenderness, love, optimism, and hope in immortality. Coffee suggests taverns, cafes, sailing vessels, yachts, boarding-houses-by-the-river-side, and pessimism. Tea suggests optimism. Coffee is a tonic; tea, a comfort. Coffee is prose; tea is poetry. Whoever thinks of taking coffee into a sick-room? Who doesn't think of taking in the comforting cup of tea? ...
— The Little Tea Book • Arthur Gray
... To Shakspeare, for instance, it was full of a profound terror. It crushed, and appalled, and touched him; and there was not only implied in it that for us life does mean little, but that by some possibility it might have meant much. Or else, if the pessimism has been more complete than this, it has probably been adopted as a kind of solemn affectation, or has else been lamented as a form of diseased melancholy. It is a view that healthy intellects have hitherto declined to entertain. Its advocates ...
— Is Life Worth Living? • William Hurrell Mallock
... a smile. He was acquainted with that more or less literary form of pessimism. In former days all such views, as, for instance, the struggle of civilization against the birth-rate, and the relative childlessness of the most intelligent and able members of the community, had disturbed him. But since he had fought the cause ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... of elusiveness about his life. Our lack of knowledge respecting him, however, is due in part to the fact that near the close of his life, while he was oscillating in a half-rational condition between Andover and Boston, with an occasional visit to Plymouth, he fell into a fit of pessimism and despair during which he spent two days in obliterating the materials for his biography, by destroying all his letters and manuscripts. He did as much as he could to make impossible any adequate account of his career or any suitable revelation of his character as developed in his correspondence. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... view of life is that of the Soofi, with the usual dash of Buddhistic pessimism. The profound sorrow of existence, so often sung by the dreamy Eastern poet, has now passed into the practical European mind. Even the light ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... poet describes the nothingness of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the Renes is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living and its vexations. The disappointed son of the ghetto lays no stress on gratifications and pleasures. In the name of the supreme moral law he sets himself up for a ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... that came to my mind, and certainly Burrows, the head of the place—a large, red-faced, smiling man with glasses—seemed to me altogether too cheerful and pleased with life to penetrate the wicked recesses of Russian pessimism. ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole |
