"Pessimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... many cases of women pleading publicly and bringing suit. Indeed, according to Juvenal—who is, however, a pessimist by profession—the ladies found legal proceedings so interesting that bringing suit became a passion with them as strong as it had once been among the Athenians. Thus Juvenal[143]: "There is almost no case in which a woman wouldn't bring suit. ...
— A Short History of Women's Rights • Eugene A. Hecker
... part," declared Santerre, resuming the pose of an elegant pessimist, "if she wishes to die, I shan't oppose her. In fact, I'm ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... predominates over good in the vision of this "Voyant," as Philarete Chasles so justly called him, two very respectable, and in one case very large, though somewhat opposed divisions of mankind, the philosophic pessimist and the convinced and consistent Christian believer, will tell us that this is at least not one of the points in which it is unfaithful to life. If the author is closer and more faithful in his study of meanness and vice than in his studies of nobility ...
— The Human Comedy - Introductions and Appendix • Honore de Balzac
... theory I put forward in 'Life and Habit,' and which I am now again insisting on, is pessimism—pure and simple. I have a very vague idea what pessimism means, but I should be sorry to believe that I am a pessimist. Which, I would ask, is the pessimist? He who sees love of beauty, design, steadfastness of purpose, intelligence, courage, and every quality to which success has assigned the name of "worth," as having drawn the pattern of every leaf and organ now and in all past time, or he ...
— Evolution, Old & New - Or, the Theories of Buffon, Dr. Erasmus Darwin and Lamarck, - as compared with that of Charles Darwin • Samuel Butler
... of time and observe the mighty changes which have come within our movement; when we hear the reports of the awakening of men and women to the justice of our cause all the way around the world, I am sure that there is no pessimist among us who does not realize that at last the tide of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... this little girl that was a star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar—and thus our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and though ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... slumbered, but now it awoke in remorse and pain, and, repulsing its habitual exaltations as if they were sins, he turned to the primal idea of the vileness of this life, and its sole utility in enabling man to gain heaven. A pessimist he admitted himself to be so far as this world was concerned. But the manifestations of modern pessimism were checked by constitutional mysticity. Schopenhauer, when he overstepped the line ruled by the Church, was repulsed. From him ...
— Celibates • George Moore
... Christians he was a pessimist about this world and an optimist about the next; for that is usually the state of mind of those who labour under any material or bodily disability, from slavery, which is the ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... Dostoievski, from whom he absorbed so much, taught him the formulas of his mysticism—though Tolstoi has never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor. Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien Rops could never have been a romantic, though the macabre romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal, bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so often lamentable ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... name, don't like it. There's no smeddum to it. Besides, it makes me think of my Aunt Jinny. She called her three girls Faith, Hope, and Charity. Faith didn't believe in anything—Hope was a born pessimist—and Charity was a miser. You ought to be called Red Rose—you look like one when you're mad. I'LL call you Red Rose. And you've roped me into promising to go to church? But only once a month, remember—only once a month. ...
— Rainbow Valley • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of renunciation, and I do not intend to end by being pelted with stones. The dynasty would never survive such a peace." The dynasty has departed, the stones have been thrown, and the peace of renunciation has become a reality, and is certainly more terrible than the gloomiest pessimist could ...
— In the World War • Count Ottokar Czernin
... of derisive boyish laughter greeted this remark from the fellow named Oliver, who apparently was a bit of a pessimist, one of those who, while admitting that a day might be nearly perfect, chose to remember it was apt to be a weather-breeder, and bound to be followed by ...
— Jack Winters' Baseball Team - Or, The Rivals of the Diamond • Mark Overton
... has made up her mind to the change, but grandmother is bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and she does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she says; no deep attachment between employer and employed; no reverence of the humbler members of a household for ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from the weariness of the tired years that make up life. For who shall disprove the pessimist's assertion that it is better not to have been born than to come into the world, and that it is better to die than to live? But those from whom the single hope of their existence is ravished find little consolation in reason. Grief is the most intensely egotistical of ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... whether that ideal happiness was not too complete to last. In the years I had lived I had become a pessimist. I feared a too-complete ideal. The realization of our hopes is always followed by a poignant despair. In this world there is no cup of sweetness without dregs of bitterness. The man who troubles after the to-morrow creates trouble for ...
— Hushed Up - A Mystery of London • William Le Queux
... optimist, having a cogent answer to all gloomy predictions; from 1895 to 1902 he was a pessimist; yet reasons just as strong may be adduced for considering the future of the country secure in the later as were urged in the earlier period. But as Godkin grew older, he became a moral censor, and it is characteristic of censors to exaggerate ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... that pessimism is the only cheerful philosophy? The pessimist is not concerned over the so-called yellow peril—at least the pessimist who subscribes to the theory of the degradation of energy. Europe is losing its pep, but so is Asia. There may be a difference of degree, but not enough to keep one from sleeping soundly o' nights. The twentieth or ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... fortitude and endurance to a man of spirit, that were involved by the visitations of "Commissioners," with their fore-ordained mission of lowering Dick's rents, rents that, in Dick's opinion, were already philanthropically low. Major Talbot-Lowry, like many of his tribe, though a pessimist in politics, was an optimist in most other matters, and found it impossible to conceive a state of affairs when he would be unable to do—approximately—whatever he had a mind for. At the age of fifty-eight, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... come after him proceed consciously and unconsciously from him, some of them being mere worthless imitators. In this genre, if I am not misemploying that term, he remained without a peer. Add that this philosopher is a pessimist by temperament and by conviction, and you will have as complete a characterization as it is possible to design of so strong and complex a figure as his in two ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... hundred pounds for the wheat he saw nothing but success and happiness ahead. His faith in the farm and farming swelled. Dad was not a pessimist—when ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... That interesting pessimist, Herr Arthur Schopenhauer, advocates universal polygamy upon the theory that all women would thus be supported. To the unprejudiced observer who reads the comic papers and goes to afternoon receptions, it would seem that each woman should have several husbands, to pay her bills and see that she ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... his eyes must be in fact greater, and not, as may perhaps be the case, only more vividly perceived, than those of the bygone ages. A call to repentance easily takes the form of an assertion that the devil is getting the upper hand; and we may hope that the pessimist view is only a form of the discontent which is a necessary condition of improvement. Anyhow, the diametrical conflict of prophecies suggests one remark which often impresses me. We are bound to call each other by terribly hard names. A ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... face of one of those preternaturally aged monkeys that sit motionless in a dark corner of the cage, oppressed with the sins and sorrows of a hundred centuries. And yet it mustn't be supposed that Patsy was either a pessimist or a misanthrope. Patsy's gray Irish eye could sparkle merrily and his thin little Irish mouth usually wore a whimsical smile. It was as though he realized that life was but a hollow mockery and yet had bravely resolved ...
— The New Boy at Hilltop • Ralph Henry Barbour
... the hope that rich tolls, growing larger as navigation grew better, would flow into the treasury, until all the canals would be completed and all the debts wiped out. The Radical was more than a pessimist—he was a strict constructionist of the act of 1842. He held that the Seymour bill was a palpable departure from the policy of that act, and that other measures, soon to follow, would eventually overthrow such a policy. To all this Seymour replied in his report, that "just views of ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... emphasis;[541] on the unwholesome luxury and restlessness of the upper classes,[542] and on their unrestrained indulgence of bodily appetites. In his magnificent scorn he probably exaggerated the evils of his day, yet we have seen enough in previous chapters to suggest that he was not a mere pessimist; there is no trace in his poem of cynicism, or of a soured temperament. We may be certain that he was absolutely convinced of the truth of all ...
— Social life at Rome in the Age of Cicero • W. Warde Fowler
... Monarch of Mincing Lane' tells of the London streets, the heroine of 'The Handsome Humes' is an actress, the scenes in 'Briseis' are played in Athens, Scotland, and England. All these novels have tragic and exceptional episodes, the humor is broad, as the humor of a pessimist always is, and the reader finds himself laughing at a practical joke on the heels of a catastrophe. Mr. Black knows his London, especially the drawing-room aspect of it, and his latest novel is sure to have the latest touch of fad and fashion, although white heather ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... position of the woman as the center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience, and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put upon, and the bully from putting upon others. The ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Governments cannot really divest themselves of religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... the first one dressed, went out to watch the weather, and in a short time came running in, in tears. There was a cloud coming up, and Bugsey, the pessimist, knew it was going ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... . curious!" he murmured in a mild sotto-voce,—"A would- be pessimist!—aye, aye,—'tis very greatly the fashion for young men in these days to assume the manner of elderly and exhausted cynics who have tried everything and approve of nothing! 'Tis a strange craze!—but, my good sir, let us keep to the subject at present under discussion. Like all ...
— Ardath - The Story of a Dead Self • Marie Corelli
... Lanky Smith, a small, undersized man of retiring disposition. Then came Skinny Thompson, six feet four on his bared soles, and true to his name; Hopalong described him as "th' shadow of a chalk mark." Pete Wilson, the slow-witted and very taciturn, and Billy Williams, the wavering pessimist, were of ordinary height and appearance. Red Connors, with hair that shamed the name, was the possessor of a temper which was as dry as tinder; his greatest weakness was his regard for the rifle as a means of preserving peace. Johnny Nelson was ...
— Hopalong Cassidy's Rustler Round-Up - Bar-20 • Clarence Edward Mulford
... be the Retrospect of the Past, what is the Prospect of the Future? Will the progress of the last forty or the last ninety years be maintained? I trust it will, but one need not be a pessimist to be sensible that the humane treatment of the insane may have its ebb as well as its flow; that so far from its being true that there is a constant and certain tendency to humanity, there is also a strange tendency to relapse into inhuman ways. Vigilance is and ...
— Chapters in the History of the Insane in the British Isles • Daniel Hack Tuke
... etc., one should kindly reply, and, if not able to give the desired information, should, if possible, direct the stranger where to make further inquiries. Cheerful interest in the perplexities of a bewildered sojourner in the city costs nothing and is always highly appreciated. Only a pessimist or a snob would dismiss ...
— Etiquette • Agnes H. Morton
... means a pessimist. Every forward step has its bad side, but nevertheless is a forward step. It is in the nature of things that we shall never reach a millennium, though we may considerably improve the value and dignity of human life. Democracy has ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... tried to look. But they saw nothing. Except for the booming of the surf, they might have been on a landless sea, alone in the black night. Don Anastasio was shaking at such a rate that his two companions in the dark wheelhouse were conscious of it. He cursed the quartermaster for a pessimist. The skipper, though, was brave enough ...
— The Missourian • Eugene P. (Eugene Percy) Lyle
... struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes which never had substantial existence; the pauperising ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... overestimation &c. v.; exaggeration &c. 549; vanity &c. 880; optimism, pessimism, pessimist. much cry and little wool, much ado about nothing; storm in a teacup, tempest in a teacup; fine talking. V. overestimate, overrate, overvalue, overprize, overweigh, overreckon[obs3], overstrain, overpraise; eulogize; estimate ...
— Roget's Thesaurus • Peter Mark Roget
... because she created no jealousy and always unconsciously put herself at a disadvantage; men did not mind her prattle and coquettish airs, being well aware that nothing was expected of them. For Miss Luscombe, though vain, was a pessimist, and quite good-natured. She was also a ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... hats. One man is six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the empty case, and says, 'I win.' Then the elevated pessimist goes down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty- dollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don't know how much money it was; it looked as big as an earthquake-relief ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... something immeasurably greater than anything that is represented by such a view as this: their real value and meaning are indeed little understood. The first of the mistakes about Byron lies in the fact that he is treated as a pessimist. True, he treated himself as such, but a critic can hardly have even a slight knowledge of Byron without knowing that he had the smallest amount of knowledge of himself that ever fell to the lot of an intelligent ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... pessimistic too, like Sylvia? Pray don't be pessimistic. There is a dreadful pessimist in my book, who always thinks the worst is going ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... This gentleman is a pessimist as to the future. "I am a youngish man still," he said, "and a single man, and I am glad of it. I don't believe the English will ever learn how to govern this country, and I am sure it can never govern itself. Would your people ...
— Ireland Under Coercion (2nd ed.) (2 of 2) (1888) • William Henry Hurlbert
... 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 discover ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... not a pessimist as regards marriage," she added. "And I think men are quite as good as women, and ...
— The Way of Ambition • Robert Hichens
... which is something like an altruistic pessimist. In the society of rationalists Burke was a conservative, and when with the conservatives he was a rationalist. That he was absolutely honest and sincere there is not a particle of doubt, and we will have to leave ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 7 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Orators • Elbert Hubbard
... a pessimist or a scaremonger, but without some of these men I don't believe we women would have won the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... that social order is derived from and is based upon the order of nature. Although savage passions, excited by an imperfect understanding of the truth, do from time to time cause the overthrow of given societies, and arouse the horror and alarm of pessimist votaries of myth, nature is not thereby overcome; she still triumphs, and restores the order which has been interrupted, so far as the instinct of conservatism and the hereditary impulse to that special form of association to which each ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... virtues; and in writing for them he was, as it were, the Jefferson, the triumphant democrat of English letters. Thackeray was intellectual; he looked at men with critical eyes, and was a realist and a pessimist. Dickens was emotional; he looked at men with kindled imagination, judged them by the dreams they cherished in their hearts, and was a romanticist and an optimist. Both men were humorists; but where Thackeray was delicately satirical, causing us a momentary smile, ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... Sanders, who had been in the chorus of different comic-opera companies since he was twenty years old, and who was something of a pessimist, used to take great pleasure in abusing the other members of the company to Andy M'Gee, and in telling anecdotes concerning them which were extremely detrimental to their characters. He could not find anything good to say of any of them, and M'Gee began to believe that the stage was a very terrible ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... journey. While alighting from the train I was suddenly seized with such severe internal pains, accompanied by faintness and nausea, that on arrival at the Slaviansky Bazar (the best Hotel, by the way, in the place), I was carried to bed. The attack was inexplicable. Harding, ever a pessimist, suggested appendicitis, and a physician was hastily summoned. The medicine-man gravely shook his head: "You are very ill," he said, and I did not dispute the fact. "Can it be appendicitis?" I asked anxiously. "Appendicitis," replied the Doctor; "what is that? ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... not a pessimist you are a scepteec, that's still worse." Mihalevitch's talk had a strong flavour of his mother-country, Little Russia. "And what right have you to be a scepteec? You have had ill-luck in life, let us admit; that was not your fault; you were born ...
— A House of Gentlefolk • Ivan Turgenev
... the pessimist was obliged to admit that Tony could fight, even if he was not quick with ...
— The Pothunters • P. G. Wodehouse
... of why I am a little slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off the ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... banquet, when they were all bidding the guest good-bye with tears streaming down their faces, the only pessimist in town ...
— Best Short Stories • Various
... But the carvings produce more carvings. The flames produce nothing but a little black heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the energy, but in the effect. When the optimist has said, "All things are interesting," we are left free; we can be interested ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... their more conventional blue-black tresses. It seems that the grandfather of these girls had been an American sailor, who for some reason or other was marooned at Cagayan, Mindanao. Making the most, or as a pessimist might think, the worst of a disadvantageous situation, he married a native girl and raised a large and presumably interesting family, his descendants being scattered all over the island. The Misamis branch were extremely aristocratic, and so proud of their blue blood that since ...
— A Woman's Journey through the Philippines - On a Cable Ship that Linked Together the Strange Lands Seen En Route • Florence Kimball Russel
... pessimist role is a modern day fad, But, Roger, you make a poor cynic, my lad. Your heart at the core is as sound as a nut, Though the wheels of your mind have dropped into the rut Of wrong thinking. You need a strong hand on the ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... millions of intellectual and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment against the civilization and the ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... letter to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should be a member of it. In much of his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... says the pessimist, "is the fly in all this precious ointment?" Alasl It is not a game fish; it will not take bait, spoon, or fly, and its finest properties vanish in ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... staterooms so-called were boxes in which the bunks were shelves spread with patches of filthy bed-clothing, somewhat after the style of a mustard plaster. This criticism must be taken with a little reservation. Dickens was a pessimist and always censorious and as he had been feted and feasted with the fat of the land, he expected that he should have been entertained in kingly quarters on shipboard. But because things did not come up to his expectations he dipped his pen in ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... his desire pure, and his meditations were often touched with imaginative beauty. Again and again he flashes light into the darkest penetralia of the human soul. At times, too, there is in him a mystic fervor worthy of St. Augustine. If his dominant tone is melancholy, he is not to be called a pessimist. He believed in the Good at the central core of things. Hence is he a fascinating personality, a stimulative force. And these outpourings of an acute intellect, and a nature sensitive to the Ideal, are conveyed in a diction ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... studied the world's history and manners; they have wandered far and wide and observed life for themselves. They have thought much. The great change has come about; the work has been done, whether poorly or otherwise, and, upon the whole, the good will prevail. The pessimist may complain that nothing has come of all the effort made in behalf of the Indian. I say that it is not too late for the original American to regain and reestablish his former physical excellency. Why should he not? Much depends upon his own mental attitude, and this is becoming more normal ...
— The Indian Today - The Past and Future of the First American • Charles A. Eastman
... a little mite too jolly for a minister's wife?" questioned Mrs. Ossian Popham, who was a professional pessimist. ...
— The Romance of a Christmas Card • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... jaded, world-worn man, who is no longer interested in women . . . and girls! The poor, tired pessimist who has lost all faith in the goodness ...
— The Human Drift • Jack London
... be cynic or pessimist was Louis McGregor Abraham, proprietor of the Imperial Hotel—Syrian by birth, Jew by creed, Englishman by nationality, and admirer first, last and all the time of all things prosperous and promising, except ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... fear the label of an idea. When I say that your position is that of the pessimist, it is not more of an accusation than if I said it was that of the optimist. The thing to concern oneself with is the question, "which of these makes the nearer approach to the truth?" You have been asking me, "What is love worth?" ...
— The Kempton-Wace Letters • Jack London
... adherent by millions, and having for its advocates many of the foremost thinkers, artists, and poets of the world, to be based upon either sordid selfishness or murderous hate and envy. If that were true, if it were possible for such a thing to be true, the most gloomy forebodings of the pessimist would fall far short of the real measure of Humanity's impending doom. It is estimated that no less than thirty million adults are at present enrolled in the ranks of the Socialists throughout the world, and the number is constantly increasing. This vast army, drawn from every part of the civilized ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... many who affirm that the humourist's point of view is, on the whole, the fairest from which the world can be judged. It is equally remote from the misleading side-lights of the pessimist and from the wilful blindness of the optimist. It sees things with uncompromising clearness, but it judges of them with tolerance and good temper. Moreover, a sense of the ridiculous is a sound preservative of social virtues. It places ...
— Americans and Others • Agnes Repplier
... deemed by the close students of life as a most essential element in the achievement of the highest and fullest success. The optimist sees open paths leading to pleasant and prosperous fields of endeavor where the pessimist can see no way out of the hopeless surroundings amid which he has been thrust by an unkind fate. The disposition to seize upon the opportunities lying close at hand and to believe that the here and now is full of sunshine and golden ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... Pryor is a pessimist, an artist, a poet, a writer of stories; he drifted into our little world on the march and is with us still. He did not like his previous section and applied for a transfer into ours. He gloats over sunsets, colours, unconventional doings, hopes ...
— The Red Horizon • Patrick MacGill
... use, Faith. I've prayed until I'm tired. But don't mind me, dear. I'm what they call a pessimist. I look on the dark side of everything, I suppose; but listen, do you hear what that cash girl ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say that ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... with them. Their cassocks, their pretensions, their stupidities, roused the Irish-woman's sense of humour at every turn. The individuals came and went, but the type it seemed to her was always the same; and she made their peculiarities the basis of a pessimist theory as to the future of the English Church, which was a source of constant amusement to the very broad-minded young men who filled up the school staff. She, so ready in general to see all the world's ...
— Robert Elsmere • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest—the greatest—theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... fore head. Mme. Glozel saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had roused some memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the canary sang; where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of Louis XVI. going to heaven in the arms ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... and professionally cheerful person is very depressing. The pessimist always has wit, for wit reveals itself in the knowledge of values. And the individual who accepts what Fate sends, and undoes Calamity by drinking all of it, is sure to have a place in our calendar ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... the refrain of the nineteenth century pessimist. But, as before, the sprouting of new thought and belief is visible to the attentive eye all over the surface of the sordid field of a decaying civilization. The time has come when the spirit of Columbus' ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... therefore be said that although the war has had for my country the most cruel consequences, there is one consolation to it. It has shown that humility is better than the pessimist had said it was, and that money is not the only god before which the nations bow. It has revealed that all over the world, and especially in America, there is a respect for right and for duty; it has proved that the moral beauty of ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... Buddha, whom the Catholic Church converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the deity), on account of the mystery of the cruelty of things. Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbes model pessimist, who at the humblest distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found the vision of mans unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent, heartless, ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... pessimist, now getting grey and more gaunt of blue, ill-shaven cheek. "To me it is seven ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... What cause the pessimist has for his boding views when in cities like New York, Quaker Philadelphia, Chicago and San Francisco, the City Halls, those centres of municipal life, hold and are ruled by the worst and most dangerous gangs of criminals sheltered by ...
— Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison - Fifteen Years in Solitude • Austin Biron Bidwell
... crane or a swallow, so did I chatter!" said the rueful prophet. I do not write as a pessimist, hardly as a critic; still less as a censor; to waste time in deriding others' theories of life is a very poor substitute for enjoying it! I think we do very fairly well as we are; only do not let us indulge in the cant in which educators so freely indulge, the claim that we are interested ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of fiction, Emerson would have considered a sin; while the evolution of sin and its effect on character was the principal study of Hawthorne's life. One was an optimist, and the other what is sometimes unjustly called a pessimist: that is, one who looks facts in the face and sees people as they are. Hawthorne could not have felt quite comfortable in the presence of a man who asked such searching questions as Emerson frequently did, and Emerson could ...
— Sketches from Concord and Appledore • Frank Preston Stearns
... Ephrussi, his friend, testify. He was much at home in Germany and there is no denying the influence of Teutonic thought and spirit on his susceptible nature. Naturally prone to pessimism (he has called himself a "mystic pessimist") as was Amiel, the study of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann solidified the sentiment. He met an English girl, Leah Lee, by name, and after giving her lessons in French, fell in love, and in 1887 married ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... objectively minded of French writers, the illustrious Taine, would gain admission. His work, he himself declared, "was nothing but pure or applied psychology," and psychology is apt to clash with the facts of history. Scherer described Taine, somewhat unjustly, as "a pessimist in a passion," whilst the critical and conscientious Aulard declared that his work was "virtually useless for the purposes of history." Mr. Gooch classes Sorel's work as "incomparably higher" than that of Taine. Montalembert ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... the surface, and is nothing but the vividness of his dialogues. It is a great deal more; it lies in the truth of his characters, subtly drawn, but irresistible, and, now and again, tenderly pathetic. Thus may you see the optimist and pessimist, and the link between them, in the following scene in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... I'm not a pess—' he checked at the word and then took it at a run, 'a pessimist, but, as things are going on—well, you have been out of the country and—and you can't help it, I suppose. You may laugh! P'raps you haven't got daughters—not that I have either, praise glory! But nieces, if the father's a fool, wear you out very ...
— The Philanderers • A.E.W. Mason
... it leaves him. His plans and schemes lie as incapable of development as the fallen tree is incapable of new sproutings. At the time the book of Ecclesiastes was written, the belief in any life after death was little known in Israel. This book was the work of a thorough pessimist, whose constant refrain was—Vanity of Vanities, all is Vanity. It gives no hint of a second life; and in the absence of this faith the present life is to the writer an insoluble problem. This saying really expressed the popular belief that death ended everything. ...
— The Right and Wrong Uses of the Bible • R. Heber Newton
... map, his pipe sticking rakishly out of one side of his mouth, looked up amused at the Frenchman's evident excitement, while Adrian, who had been busy with the uppermost row of books upon his west wall, looked down from his ladder perch, with the pessimist's constitutional expectation of ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than the pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory of human nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like David Hume thinks that almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative, and wishes ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... she could never comprehend was the pessimism that so often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all when he once got started on the cosmic pathos of religion and the gibbering ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... "What a pessimist you are!" cried Tabitha, eyeing her companion in surprise. "You are usually just the opposite. What is the matter with ...
— Tabitha's Vacation • Ruth Alberta Brown
... writer claims to belong as little to the Pessimist as to the Bombastic school—to borrow Mr. Seeley's phrase—unless it is to be a Pessimist to seek a foothold in positive conditions and to insist on facing hard facts. The sense of English kinship is as lively in us as in other people, and we have ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... the letter to Darwin of December 28 is characteristic of his own view of life. As he wrote four years before (see above), he was no pessimist any more than he was a professed optimist. If the vast amount of inevitable suffering precluded the one view, the gratuitous pleasures, so to speak, of life preclude the other. Life properly lived is worth living, and would be even if ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 2 • Leonard Huxley
... five meals a day, and sometimes expanding his chest to its utmost and extending his arms to the zenith, yawned prodigiously. Born a true pessimist, often was bored to the extreme by existence. In addition to the fortnightly symphony concerts and their necessary rehearsals, he did nothing but compose and dream of new spaces to conquer. He was a Czar over his orchestra, and though a fat, good-humored man, ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... a pessimist to assert the actual evidence thus far obtained indicates that the supposed progress made in the improvement of domesticated animals and plants is nothing more than the sorting out of pure lines, and thus represents no advancement."—Prof. L.B. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... of his works, Andreyev is not a pessimist. Under one of his pictures he has written: "Though it destroys individuals, the truth saves mankind." The misery in the world may be ever so great; the problems that force themselves upon man's mind may seem ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... be the centre of the scheme of the world. Round this centre revolved wheels within wheels of cruelty, of agony, of ruthless passions and of lawless bitterness. Yet they radiated from pity. They radiated from love. How it was so he could not tell, and there the pessimist had him by the throat. But that it was so he felt in his inmost heart, and never more than now, when the tired boy sneered at him, who was an old friend, clean of life, gentle of nature, and turned to this girl, this thing that loathsome men played with and scorned. Cuckoo flushed ...
— Flames • Robert Smythe Hichens
... old Tasio seemed to have been dissipated forever. One day Ibarra told the old man so, but the old pessimist only replied: "Things may go well at first, but be on your guard against ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... self-consciousness added to the myriad-sided consciousness of the past. Hence an involution rather than an elucidation of the play. There can be no doubt that Shakspere, in heightening and deepening the theme, has obscured it, making the scheming barbarian into a musing pessimist, who yet waywardly plays the mock-madman as of old, and kills the "rat" behind the arras; doubts the Ghost while acting on his message; philosophises with Montaigne and yet delays his revenge in the spirit of the Christianised savage, who fears to send the praying murderer to heaven. ...
— Montaigne and Shakspere • John M. Robertson
... deluge, but if the cause of said deluge was in order to get a better generation, it may. I don't think the actual generation is better than it was the anti-deluge, pardon me if you can't digest what I say. I am a pessimist to the superlative grade, and it is not without reason that I say so. I had sad experience with the World. Thank God for having doted me with a generous dose of philosophic! Swimming against the tide, not me, not such a ...
— The Smiling Hill-Top - And Other California Sketches • Julia M. Sloane
... happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist. He is always inclined to give Nature the benefit of the doubt. His favourite term for this mental complaisance is "catholicity of faith," or, it may be, "a divine hope." The less fortunate brethren ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... what kind they are," the pessimist replied intolerantly. "I'm asking you to face facts. Because you've succeeded in an attack, you soldiers seem to think that the war is ended. You base your arguments all the time on your little local knowledge of your ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of all lives. It is only in theory that solitude is morbid. If you knew more of the world, Miss Thurwell, you would understand something of its cramping influence upon all independent thought. I am not a pessimist—at least, I try not to be. I do not wish to say that there is more badness than goodness in the world, but there is certainly more littleness than greatness. To live in any manner of society without ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... and what are doubtless his deserts, for he is a very clever man, and politicians who are a little disappointed have a certain tendency to ultra-censoriousness, which damages the effectiveness and prejudices the authority of their criticisms. Thus, Sir Edward has been always more or less of a pessimist with regard to the doings of other men. On August 28th he spoke in decidedly alarmist terms of the lessons which should be taught to us by the loss of the "Victoria." Speaking with the modesty of a mere ...
— Sketches In The House (1893) • T. P. O'Connor
... to the world that you are not well balanced. Grumbling won't help things a bit. The more you indulge in the habit the more firmly it becomes fixed upon you, and later you will find it almost impossible to shake it off. The grumbler grows to be a pessimist; he says disagreeable things; he makes his friends feel ill at ease. The grumbler gradually loses his acquaintances and even ...
— Dollars and Sense • Col. Wm. C. Hunter
... heroes are mostly men engaged in a quest for the joys of life, but never attaining whole-hearted enjoyment, because of their innate streak of world-weariness. When the hero of his Anatol (1893) calls himself "light-hearted pessimist," Schnitzler creates a term which fits as well his Fedor in Maerchen (1894), his Fritz in Liebelei (1895), and other specimens of a type related to the heroes of Musset and other Frenchmen. His women, too, have a streak of French blood, ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... dismal argument, full of words and repetitions but with few ideas, and from the trend of it the curious fact appeared that La Touche, the ship's grouser and dismal James, was taking the optimistical side, whilst Bompard, generally cheerful, was the pessimist. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... little offence as he shows us offensive things and people. He is a writer who desires above all things to see what men and women are really like—to extenuate nothing and to set down naught in malice. As a result, he is a pessimist, but a pessimist who is black without being bitter. I know no writer who leaves one with the same vision of men ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... m'oter cela'! I see no future for me here, and certainly should have departed long ago if I had had the money, but, as I have already told you, all that I can do barely suffices to procure me 'de quoi vivre'. 'Je me sens ecceuye'. Do not pay too much attention to my Jeremiads; you know what a pessimist I am. 'Je ne ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... "Come in, pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... thus only CAN 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 the Pessimist view. ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... good room for him," said John, "but although I don't want to appear a pessimist, Miss Julie, I don't think he'll come just now, at least not in the Arrow. All aeroplane, balloon and Zeppelin trains have stopped running during the blizzard. Blizzard is an American word of ours meaning a driving storm. It's expressive, and it can be used with ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... is itself an illusion what is there to guarantee the reality of good? The sword with which Mrs. Eddy cut the knot of the problem of evil is two-edged. If the optimist denies evil for the sake of good and points for proof to the solid coherency of the happier side of life, the pessimist may as justly deny good for the sake of evil and point for proof to the solid coherency of the sadder side of life; he will have no trouble in finding his facts. If sickness is a dream then health is a dream as well. Once we have taken illusion for a guide there is no stopping until everything ...
— Modern Religious Cults and Movements • Gaius Glenn Atkins
... that this should be the end of the conversation, and that such a conversation should end in Overbeck, and a perfectly elegant bow? Wonderful man! Yes, for that was no petulant child, with childish requests, evasions, outbursts; but a premature man, almost an old man. A reasoner; a pessimist; a sceptic. A genial head! What elegance! What command of self. A princely exterior. Marvellous man! What could he do with him? If he had asked for forgiveness; had promised, in part, even to accommodate himself to ...
— The Argonauts • Eliza Orzeszko (AKA Orzeszkowa)
... cut off now from all ministration, all comforting—to have to lie there like a log, imagining the moment when the neighbours should come in and say, "It is all over—they have broken his neck—and buried him"—it was a doom beyond all even that her timid pessimist heart had ever dreamed. She had already seen him twice in prison, and she knew that she would see him again. She was to go on Monday, Miss Boyce said, before the trial began, and after—if they brought ...
— Marcella • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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 ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... old pessimist! But it wasn't! Here you are, Ressaldar Sahib! Never have I seen a horse so set on killing himself. But it was needful to ...
— Captain Desmond, V.C. • Maud Diver
... The pessimist tells us that the universe is bad all the way through, that this is the worst possible kind of world. When a man makes a statement like that, I always wish to ask him a question which it seems to me absolutely overturns his position, how did he happen to find it out? If the universe is bad ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... development, to lose clarity of vision, and to invite that devastating disease of our time and of all times, morbid self-consciousness. The man who lives exclusively in thought becomes a theorist, an indifferent observer, or a cynic; he who lives exclusively in feeling becomes a sentimentalist or a pessimist; he who lives exclusively in action becomes a mere executive energy, a pure objective force in society. These types are found in all times, and exhibit in a great variety of ways ...
— Essays On Work And Culture • Hamilton Wright Mabie
... he passed warped and scorched and cracked this mighty compound, but without destroying it. A glimpse of this experience which transformed the powerful, joyous, bright-visaged singer into a bitter, darkly brooding pessimist, fleeing from the sinister shadow which threatened to overtake him, is afforded us ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... hear the pessimist cry, but unfortunately for Friend Pessimist, we have a gauge on the over-production idea that lays all fears to rest. When the supply of any commodity increases faster than the demand, we have over-production and falling prices. Vice-versa, under-production ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... he said contemptuously. "The average American is bright. If one prefixes no stronger adjective than that to his name, he accomplishes very little in life. Don't think me a pessimist," he added, smiling. "All over the country the Schools and colleges are instilling the principles of conservatism and practical politics on the old lines, and therein lies hope. I feel sure I shall live to see the ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... Doctor. 'It is very well said. It is the true answer to the pessimist, and the standing miracle of mankind. So you still love me? and so you can forgive your wife? Why, then, we may bid conscience "Down, dog," like an ill-trained puppy yapping ...
— Prince Otto • Robert Louis Stevenson
... doubtful, I am sorry to say, about the length of the war and its seriousness. In all wars nations are apt to minimize their dangers and the duration. Men, after all, see the power of their own country; they cannot visualize the power of the enemy. I have been accounted as a pessimist among my friends in thinking the war would not be over before Christmas. I have always been convinced that the result is inevitably a triumph for this country. I have also been convinced that that result will ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy of inconsistency and dual ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... pessimist is one who never expects to find anything to suit him. Geordie hain't got ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... be deceived just the same," said Athos, who was an optimist when things were concerned, and a pessimist when men were in question. "They will promise everything for the sake of the money, and on the road fear will prevent them from acting. Once taken, they will be pressed; when pressed, they will confess everything. ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... would be on my side, Miss Louise." Charlie smiled deprecatingly. "I've argued with Aunt Martha and Peter until— But I didn't know you were a confirmed pessimist as well!" ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... few minutes; his manner was very curt, business-like. He wanted her to sing a popular song, a bit from a Verdi opera, Gounod's Ave Maria, so that he could get a line on what she could do. He appeared to be a pessimist in ...
— Big Timber - A Story of the Northwest • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... knowledge of divine truth is being gained by the people. The individual of pessimistic temperament may say that the masses are not being influenced and lifted up by the Negro pulpit, but this would be a mere statement and not an actual fact. The pessimist lives in an unwholesome atmosphere, he will not see the sunshine because he prefers to stay down in the valley beneath the cloud of doubt and surmounted with the fog of hopelessness. The educated Negro pulpit is mainly ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... same atmosphere—the atmosphere of a London November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation—and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each of us, what ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... have it, Hump," he said, closing the book upon his finger and looking up at me. "The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this pessimism of the blackest?—'All is vanity and vexation of spirit,' 'There is no profit under the sun,' 'There is one event unto all,' to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and the saint, and that event is death, and an evil thing, he says. ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... begins every time again from the beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill and down; they may be growing steadily better or steadily worse; but ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the other hand, had no such scruples. She was more like Esther in nature, with a touch of cynicism curling her dainty lip, arising, perhaps, from an early divination that she was to lack Esther's opportunities. Perhaps it was because she was the pessimist—the quite cheerful pessimist—of the family, that she was by far the cleverest and most industrious at the housework. If it was her fate to be Cinderella, she might as well make the best of it, with a cynical endurance and good-humour, ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... the most attractive and enterprising of the new Members. But I am afraid, despite his cheery appearance, that he is a bit of a pessimist. With Peace believed to be so near, it was distinctly depressing to find him calling attention to the danger of a deficiency of pit-props "in any future war," and refusing to be put off with the usual official answer, "in view of the urgency ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... room one evening I was walking the floor wrapped in deepest gloom. No deep-dyed pessimist ever felt as I did at that moment, for I had just discovered that I had an incurable heart disease. I had often feared as much, but now I had it from a scientific source that my heart was going wrong. I could tell by the way I felt. My room-mate noticed me. He was another ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... renunciation, but of a particularly active warfare. He was not mistrustful of it, he was not disgusted with it, still less was he inclined to be suspicious of its disenchantments; but he was vividly aware that it held many possibilities of failure. Though very far from being a pessimist, he was not a man of foolish illusions. He did not like failure, not only because of its unpleasant and dangerous consequences, but also because of its damaging effect upon his own appreciation of Martin Ricardo. And this was a ...
— Victory • Joseph Conrad
... upon us to keep step with Joy and Gladness, as we march confidently down the white road which leads to the Land of our Desire. God made every young thing to be happy. He put joy and harmony into every little creature's heart. Who ever saw a kitten with a grouch? Or a little puppy who was a pessimist? But you have seen sad children a-plenty, and we are not blaming the Almighty for that either. God's plans have been all right, but they have been badly ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... made to him by Mademoiselle Idiale, her incomprehensible connection with this tragedy across which he had stumbled, and her apparent knowledge of his share in it,—these things were sufficient, indeed, to give him food for thought. Laverick was not by nature a pessimist. Other things being equal, he would have made, without doubt, a magnificent soldier, for he had courage of a rare and high order. It never occurred to him to sit and brood upon his own danger. He rather welcomed the opportunity of occupying his mind with other thoughts. Yet in ...
— Havoc • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... blase man of the world, concerned only for his comfort, the mean man of business concerned only for his profits, the man of policy always looking for a middle way, a certain type of religious pessimist who always spies danger in every proposal, and many others. We need not consider the comfort of the first nor the selfishness of the second; but the third and fourth require a word. The man of policy offers me his judgment instead ...
— Principles of Freedom • Terence J. MacSwiney
... inhabited by most marvelous men and women,—some amiable, and some detestable, but every one of them very interesting. And now I miss the wonder of it all. You will presently discover, my dear, that youth is only an ingenious prologue to whet one's appetite for a rather dull play. Eh, I am no pessimist,—one may still find satisfaction in the exercise of mind and body, in the pleasures of thought and taste and in other titillations of one's faculties. Dinner is good and sleep, too, is excellent. But we men and women tend, upon too close inspection, to appear rather paltry flies that buzz ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... didn't do it. Like all great moral teachers he acted on the assumption that there is more freedom of will than seemed theoretically possible. It was the same way with his views of national affairs. Jeremiah's reputation is that of a pessimist. Still, when the country was in the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and he was in prison for predicting it, he bought a piece of real estate which was in the hands of the enemy. He considered it a good investment. "I subscribed the deed and sealed it, and called witnesses and weighed him the money ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... also was unsuccessful in his efforts; and whoever has thoroughly realized how absurdly false and sentimental this proposition is, in a world whose essence is Will to Power, may be reminded that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, ACTUALLY—played the flute... daily after dinner: one may read about the matter in his biography. A question by the way: a pessimist, a repudiator of God and of the world, who MAKES A HALT at morality—who assents to morality, and plays the flute to laede-neminem morals, what? ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... SEUMAS. Born at Glenbrook, County Cork, Ireland, April 26, 1880,—three days and three hundred and sixteen years (?) after Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. Education: none or very little, and less German than French. Profession: pessimist. Chief interests: Russian Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and Royal College of Art, London. Profession: sculptor and dramatist. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... some unaccountable reason, whether from discontent or dyspepsia or disappointment, or disgust with this world, Carlyle gradually became a pessimist, and attacked all forms of philanthropy, thus alienating those who had been his warmest supporters. He grew more bitter and morose, until at last he howled almost like a madman, and was steeped in cynicism ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... in a somewhat overwrought condition. Rehearsals had turned him into a pessimist, and, now that the actual moment of production had arrived, his nerves were in a thoroughly jumpy condition, especially as the duologue was to begin in two minutes and the obliging person who had ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... I'll tell you to start with—plenty you may have noticed already, and plenty more you haven't had time to notice yet," said my new relative. "I'm a sulky brute, for one thing, and I've got to be a pessimist lately, for another—a horrid fault, that!—and I have ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator in perpetual motion to do. I am too much a pessimist to respect my own affections. Do you ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... of those leaders, the answer given ran thus: "Your intentions are patriotic and your accuracy of observation is probably scientific. But your conclusions are wholly erroneous. You must admit that you are a pessimist. Nor can you deny that we members of the Cabinet dispose of fuller and more decisive data for a judgment than you, with all your opportunities, can muster. After all, we do know something of the temper of the German Government. And we have cogent grounds for holding that ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon |
