"Pessimism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... be dumb till doomsday," retorted Mollie, with such a depth of pessimism that the girls had ...
— The Outdoor Girls at Bluff Point - Or a Wreck and a Rescue • Laura Lee Hope
... Is this rank pessimism or merely the vagaries of an old man dropping back into second childhood, who does not see that the world is wiser and better than ever it was, mankind and womankind, surely ...
— Marse Henry, Complete - An Autobiography • Henry Watterson
... severity of judgment should take their place. Young people with strong natures can seldom find the middle course between extremes, and this one, in curbing a desire for power, will fairly crush his whole vigour, while that one, in revolt against the tyranny of love, will become the slave of pessimism. There were days, no doubt, and weeks when Orange found every counsel, a mockery, and every law, a paradox. The strife between the flesh and the spirit went on in his life as it does in all lives, but he was one who held, that, whatever the issue of it all might ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... Coppinger's hopes and fears as to his prospects of becoming a Member of Parliament varied no more than was suitable in the possessor of the artistic temperament, but Barty, his agent in chief, maintained an attitude of unbroken pessimism. That whisper of the secret and late-declared antagonism of the Church had reached him, and in the secure seclusion of his own office he inveighed against clerical interference with all the fierceness of a dog chained ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love; none to knowledge; none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism,[140] never a Pessimism. ...
— Essays • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... spurious, unreal, and parasitic. It may make a scholastic or sophistic mind, but a worm is at the root and, with a dim sense of the vanity of all knowledge that does not become a rule of life, some form of pessimism is sure to supervene in every serious soul. With age a civilization accumulates such impedimenta, traditional flotsam and jetsam, and race fatigue proceeds with equal step with its increasing volume. Immediate utilities are better, ...
— Youth: Its Education, Regimen, and Hygiene • G. Stanley Hall
... in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it the ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... sufficiently familiar with modern pessimism, at least as a speculation; for I cannot call to mind that any of its present votaries have sealed their faith by assuming the rags and the bowl of the mendicant Bhikku, or the cloak and the wallet of the Cynic. The obstacles placed in the ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... Prince Shan's box and out of sight of its occupant that she paused. Her thoughts were in a turmoil. His presence there, after his deliberate assurance to her that he had no intention of coming, his calm and unnoticing regard of her and every one else, seemed to confirm in every way the wave of pessimism which she as well as Nigel was experiencing. She had passed Immelan in the entrance, and there was something ominously disturbing in his cool, triumphant smile. She pictured to herself the agreement signed, ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... was the outcome of a rare moment of pessimism. In his brighter moods he continued to express unbounded faith in the hens, and was willing to leave ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... While he drank, a sense of power passed over him like warmth. He was cheered, he was even exhilarated. A single cup of this miraculous fluid, and his depression was vanquished as no argument could have vanquished it. Without sermonizing, without logic even, the demon of pessimism, which has its home in an empty stomach, was expelled into spiritual darkness. He remembered that he had eaten nothing for almost twenty-four hours (having missed yesterday's dinner), and this thought carried him ...
— Virginia • Ellen Glasgow
... but gloomy depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... I was longer in finding out what the matter was. I saw much less of him than in town. Once in a while in the evenings, after ten, he would run across me on the porch of the inn, or drift into my rooms. Even after three years of more or less intimacy between us, Farrar still wore his exterior of pessimism and indifference, the shell with which he chose to hide a naturally warm and affectionate disposition. In the dining-room we sat together at the end of a large table set aside for bachelors and small families of two or three, and it seemed ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... 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 ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... believer in predestination may assume that he is predestined to eternal damnation as easily as he assumes that he is predestined to eternal salvation. But the pseudo-scientific mind and the materialistic mind is not so easily addicted to humility and pessimism. The slave morality of the Christian may lead to meekness and charity and to all the negative virtues of a degenerate Christianity. The master morality of the Anti-Christ Nietzsche must lead to the ruthless assertion of ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... that's a spot higher than he stacks up in the cow game," Pink observed with the pessimism which matrimony had given him. "You mind him asking about bad horses, last night? That Lizzie-boy never saw a bad horse; they don't grow 'em where he come from. What they don't know about riding they make up for with a ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... singular spot to find a large number of women, away up in the heart of that elemental country of fire and water and earth. But they remained untouched by any kind of pessimism, nor were they greatly interested in the campaign as a military affair. All their interest was in their work. They were a wonderful stimulus. Where a man unwittingly tended to let things slide they exhorted and energised. ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... of a world in full retreat from the world of Alfred and Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem—from this and the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the Bastille—has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly ill-founded Christian pessimism. To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem. He sees men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... another. Nobody's estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... was—not even in the souls of politicians. "Idealism" creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a politician. He is too constantly tempted to call ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... as lying in the past; the men of the Middle Ages removed it to an imaginary heaven. Both in effect despaired of this world; and consequently their characteristic philosophy is that of the tub or the hermitage. So soon as the first flush of youth was past, pessimism clouded the civilization of Greece and of Rome; and from this Christianity escaped only to take refuge in an imaginary bliss beyond the grave. But we, by means of science, have established progress. We look ...
— A Modern Symposium • G. Lowes Dickinson
... in America. An excellent antidote to the pessimism of modern writers on our social system.'' ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... was delivering a message in an unfamiliar language. "Thank God" was local, and might lend itself to an interpretation that could not be approved. But the Rector imported something into the words that was a protection, something that was of the pulpit, that held a solemnity in its pessimism. ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... staunch to his opinions, did not trouble himself in the least. For the rest, all who knew of the meditated coup of Horrocks were agitated to a degree. All hoped for success, but all agreed in a feeling of pessimism which was more or less the outcome of previous experiences of Retief. Did not they know, only too well, of the traps which had been laid and which had failed to ensnare the daring desperado in days gone by? Horrocks they fondly believed to be a very smart man, but had ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... philosophical cul-de-sac, and nothing is so depressing as a cul-de-sac. The tone is that of the political valetudinarian, watching with uneasy eye the ways of rude health. Unreflecting optimism about Popular Government is sickening, but calculated pessimism is not ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... wrath and bewilderment of her manager there is no need to speak; a long experience of famous actresses and singers had not exhausted that expert's capacity for despair. His pessimism gained some color that evening, when Truda had to face a house that was plainly willing to be unsympathetic; applause came doubtfully and in patches, till she gained a hold of them and made herself their master by main force of personality. Monsieur Vaucher, the ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... and superficial rationalism of Lewes may have affected the opinions of Miss Evans we cannot tell. He was her teacher and constant companion, and she passed as his wife; so it is probable that he strengthened in her mind that dreary pessimism which appeared in her later writings. Certain it is that she paid the penalty of violating a fundamental moral law, in the neglect of those women whose society she could have adorned, and possibly in the silent reproaches of conscience, which she portrayed ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume VII • John Lord
... out 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 ...
— The So-called Human Race • Bert Leston Taylor
... avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny, his credulity ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... said the sheeted lady, bridling. "There is, I am confident, no cause whatever for pessimism on my part. I have no misgivings as to the verdict. But not being used to courts of law, I thought it best to learn my statement, ...
— Living Alone • Stella Benson
... 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 educational ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... it in your articles—a certain pessimism and despondency. You show your feelings plainly, young man. It is an excellent quality—but dangerous. A man ought to make his mind a machine working evenly without regard to his feelings or physical ...
— The Great God Success • John Graham (David Graham Phillips)
... chance, 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 ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... magic force and inspiration belonging 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 one in which to approach seriously the art of fiction. ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... in this boat for ten other people. Ten brave men would have received the 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 ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... 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 ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... 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 ...
— Blow The Man Down - A Romance Of The Coast - 1916 • Holman Day
... in his striking book entitled "Revolt against Civilization," expresses the fear that the very foundations of civilization are being undermined. He finds reasons for great pessimism as regards the future in the results of the intelligence tests taken in the American Army during ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... first dragoman. His plot being discovered, he is arrested and sent to Constantinople; on the way he escapes, but he proceeds to Constantinople and organizes there a company of heiduks. Turkey's entrance into the European concert fills him with pessimism. The Bulgars at Constantinople believe that the civilizing influence of the West will not be in vain. He foresees a more evil despotism masked by the pseudo-liberal manoeuvres of the Powers, and henceforward he joins those Bulgars who agitate from ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... nature. The problems of the heart and 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
... by the intellectuals in all modern countries. In us of to-day, of this very hour, the wave of Eternity has broken, throwing nothing at our feet but froth. The literature of the past ten years is soaked in the pessimism of those who regret that this should be all that the travail of Time could ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... a laugh at her own pessimism, Betty, like Hamlet, having found relief in soliloquy, jumped up from her chair and crossing her room pressed the electric button near the fireplace until the noise of its ringing reverberated ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... specifically Christian: it is just as marked in the Gnostics and Mithras-worshippers as in the Gospels and the Apocalypse, in Julian and Plotinus as in Gregory and Jerome. It is hard to describe. It is a rise of asceticism, of mysticism, in a sense, of pessimism; a loss of self-confidence, of hope in this life and of faith in normal human effort; a despair of patient inquiry, a cry for infallible revelation; an indifference to the welfare of the state, a conversion ...
— Five Stages of Greek Religion • Gilbert Murray
... First, he might conceivably go on to his dying day as a bitter pessimist at war with life. In that event he would certainly never be content with the present moment. Secondly, he may outgrow his pessimism, but never come to the point where he is willing to check the flight of Time; when, that is, he shall have no more plans, hopes, dreams, that reach into the future and seem worth living for. The question ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... to write a series of books, to popularize the new realism as Schopenhauer had popularized pessimism and William ...
— Flappers and Philosophers • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... regard to all questions of religion. Europe, in the nineteenth century, as reflected in the works of Byron, Spencer, Darwin, and Schopenhauer, is very much in the same condition as intellectual Persia in the twelfth century, so far as the pessimism of Omar is representative of his day. This accounts for the wide popularity of Fitzgerald's "Rubaiyat." The book has been read eagerly and fondly studied, as if it were a new book of fin du siecle production: the last efflorescence ...
— Persian Literature, Volume 1,Comprising The Shah Nameh, The - Rubaiyat, The Divan, and The Gulistan • Anonymous
... learn what an adaptable, resilient organism man is. This, his first tentative brush with life, with the realities of pain and passion, had left him exceedingly cast down, more than a little inclined to pessimism. ...
— Burned Bridges • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... world stands in a moral position extraordinarily well adapted to the comprehension of just such a comedy of shirking; and especially the world of thought has received a powerful impulsion toward the area long occupied by Mr. Cabell's romantic pessimism. There is perhaps somewhat more demand for satire, or at least a growing toleration of it. Moreover, by sheer patience and reiteration Mr. Cabell has procured no little currency for some of his most characteristic ideas. Chivalry and gallantry, as he analyzes them, are concepts which play their ...
— The Cords of Vanity • James Branch Cabell et al
... in whole books of the Old Testament. What has the problem of Job, the wisdom of Proverbs, or the pessimism of Ecclesiastes to do with the Jew specifically? The Psalter would scarcely have had so universal an appeal had it been essentially rooted in ...
— Chosen Peoples • Israel Zangwill
... a little, then she said: "I am glad you think me an optimist. It seems to me that healthy human nature revolts from pessimism. The work that lasts is the work that cheers. Give us something with hope in it—something that appeals to the best part of us—something which, while we read, puts us in touch with fine ideals, and makes us feel ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... 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 ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the last, and would be sent to prison by legal trickery under this new law the papers said had been discovered; all so that the unions might break down and the squatters do as they liked. Which, perhaps, was why her thoughts for the time being were particularly tinged with pessimism. If the vague something called "law and order" was determined to be broken so that the bush could be dragooned for the squatter it seemed to her as well to make a substantial breakage while men were about it—and she did not believe ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny them this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... a father and a son—the son a goodly, if not a good young man; not a fool, I fancy, but very immature—pessimism, et cetera. Our special joy was the father—such a sentimental darling, and people declared he ...
— A Room With A View • E. M. Forster
... soon becomes fixed. Unconsciously it is cultivated. Then friends and members of the family turn with loathing from the atmosphere of chronic pessimism; the habitue has become a cuttlefish among his fellows, only emanating floods of inky misery. He wonders why things do not come his way; why business associates desert him and troubles assail him more and more. The truth is that imaginary troubles ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... 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 good as anybody, but a man who's been decent from the cradle up, ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... about India 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, ...
— New Ideas in India During the Nineteenth Century - A Study of Social, Political, and Religious Developments • John Morrison
... danger of this revulsion from old-time pessimism to modern optimism lies in the fact that the Higher Thought enthusiast may cut from under his feet the solid ground of reality; that he may become a dreamer instead of a thinker and doer; and that he may mistake selfish, ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... a 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 ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... either psychological or physiological sequelae, or both. The attack of 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 often flinch at ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... 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 ...
— Calvary Alley • Alice Hegan Rice
... 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.' ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... evening I had ignominiously broken down, and was plunged in the depths of an exasperated pessimism too deep even for tears, and would have believed myself the meanest and most miserable of mankind, but that everybody else, without exception, was even meaner and ...
— Peter Ibbetson • George du Marier et al
... depression and lack of interest in things which comes from over-fatigue. The most interesting occupation palls on us when we are fagged, or when our vitality is low from derangement of health. A case of indigestion may sweep us out of our usual cheery mood into a mood of discouragement and pessimism. Frayed nerves and an ill-nourished or exhausted brain are ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... of the permanent foundations of our democracy, and it was still destined to have a long life in the new West and in the South. But in that stern section of the country where its influence had been most marked there was now an increasingly sharp reaction against its determinism and its pessimism. Early in the nineteenth century the most ancient and influential churches in Boston and the leading professors at Harvard had accepted the new form of religious liberalism known as Unitarianism. The movement spread throughout Eastern Massachusetts and made its way to other States. ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... shared insensibly from being connected with 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 cast of ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Nelson's utter ruin should "inevitably follow" his marriage with Mary Simpson. Was it on account of his youth? Or was the statement due to Davison's distrust of marriage in general? If this was the reason, it is evident that Nelson was not greatly moved by his friend's pessimism; for not much more than a year later we find him making an unsuccessful proposal of marriage to Miss Andrews, the daughter of an English clergy-man at St. Omer, France, a rebuff for which, in the following year, he found consolation ...
— Old Quebec - The Fortress of New France • Sir Gilbert Parker and Claude Glennon Bryan
... it that way," said Lemuel, darkened by this black pessimism of the conductor. He had not, practically, found the world so unjust as the conductor implied, but he could not controvert his argument. He only said, "May be the right thing makes us feel good in some way we don't ...
— The Minister's Charge • William D. Howells
... by the exercise of his sense of humor. The circumstances of his life tended to make a pessimist of him. He did not understand the world and was misunderstood in return. To counteract the tendency toward pessimism, his resource was to develop his sense of humor, to create an atmosphere of gayety, by which he was enabled to meet people on a common plane. But not only in the ordinary affairs of life does it stand him in good stead, this sense of humor. It comes ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... upper passage. He, also, who 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 ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... to wit—all that passes from generation to generation, the capital sum without the results of individual usury; then we are freed, at least, from undue pessimism at the thought of the many harmful functions and environments that disfigure our civilization. Many detrimental acquired characters are to be seen all around us, but if they are not transmissible, they ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... Futurist is off the rails entirely, and he seems to see hardly anything but railways. But all that noisy nonsense of the Futurists always bored me frightfully,' Aylmer said. 'Affectation for affectation, I prefer the pose of depression and pessimism to that of bullying and high spirits. When the affected young poet pretended to be used up and worn out, one knew there was vitality under it all. But when I see a cheerful young man shrieking about how full of life ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... said Patty with the pessimism of a woman of ninety, as she stole an admiring glance at her sister. Patty's own face, irregular, piquant, tantalizing, had its peculiar charm, and her brilliant skin and hair so dazzled the masculine beholder that he took note of no small ...
— The Story Of Waitstill Baxter • By Kate Douglas Wiggin
... Samtiden,[15] at that time issued in Bergen, two articles on Shakespeare's Work in his Period of Gloom (Shakespeare i hans Digtnings morke Periode) which embody in compact form that thesis since elaborated in his big work. Shakespeare's tragedies were the outcome of a deep pessimism that had grown for years and culminated when he was about forty. He was tired of the vice, the hollowness, the ungratefulness, of life. The immediate cause must remain unknown, but the fact of his melancholy seems clear ...
— An Essay Toward a History of Shakespeare in Norway • Martin Brown Ruud
... years Mr. Darrow has been enlivening the intellectual purlieus of the city with his debates. And Mr. Darrow's debates have been always worth $1, $2 and even $5—for various reasons. It is worth at least $5 to observe at first hand what a cheering and invigorating effect Mr. Darrow's pessimism has had upon Mr. Darrow after these ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... is to say that M. Halevy's irony is delicate and playful. There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halevy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it must to ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... intellectuals as they did those of Paris or Berlin, where the revision of old standards of life and letters was promptly followed by daring experiments with new ideals. Young Vienna heard the keynotes of the new time, but it was content to evolve a new variety of an old tune. Time-honored pessimism, world-sorrow, gave way to a sophisticated and cynical world-weariness which is symptomatic of decadence. Widely different as their individualities present themselves, between the pages of their books and on the stage, both Schnitzler ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... is more shortly described as extreme fear. Then there succeeded a state of mind which is quite real, but for which no proper name has ever been found. The ancients called it Stoicism, and I think it must be what some German lunatics mean (if they mean anything) when they talk about Pessimism. It was an empty and open acceptance of the thing that happens—as if one had got beyond the value of it. And then, curiously enough, came a very strong contrary feeling—that things mattered very much indeed, and yet that they were something more than tragic. ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd believe them, all these people in the motors are ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... speeches soon silenced them; for he now set the tone to the ideas and language as well as to the manners of those about him. He had imported from his travels a certain development of the Britannic personality with its icy barriers, also a tone of Byronic pessimism as to life, together with English plate, boot-polish, ponies, yellow gloves, cigars, ...
— The Marriage Contract • Honore de Balzac
... spite of the fact that this progress has been, at times, painfully slow, it has never once ceased, and during the last century it has moved on with constantly accelerating speed until to-day the human race stands upon the highest point ever reached. I have absolutely no sympathy with that narrow pessimism which is always talking about "the good old times." All in all, there never was a time in the history of the world when man knew so much as to-day; there never was a time when his life was so ministered to by the forces of nature; never a ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... are matters we shall deal with in detail later on in relation to the housewife,—matters like innate temperament, bad training, liability to worry, wounded pride, failure, desire for sympathy, monotony of life, boredom, unhappiness, pessimism of outlook, over-aesthetic tastes, unfulfilled and thwarted desires, secret jealousy, passions and longings, fear of death, sex problems and difficulties and doubt; matters like recent illness, childbirth, poverty, overwork, wrong sex habits, lack ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... 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 ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability. The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles and Pheidias because ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits should all be preaching fatalism and {viii} predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation—a confusion in which all those priests should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... it in my message, or does it lie stillborn in some cable unwritten? God knows—I don't! But one thing at least is true:—to steer a course between an optimism that deprives us of support and a pessimism that may wreck the whole enterprise, there indeed is a Scylla and Charybdis problem, a two-horned dilemma, or whatever words may best convey the notion ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... The follies of which I speak are not particularly to be discovered among the poorer classes who have passed through the elementary schools. These" (it was to the schools that he was alluding with a comprehensive pessimism) "may account for the gross decline apparent in the public manners of our people, but not for faults which are peculiar to the upper and middle classes. It is not in the populace, but in those wealthier ranks that you will find the sort ...
— First and Last • H. Belloc
... drudgery left them little margin for expansion. Their horizon possessed the narrowest limits in consequence. Nor could it be otherwise. Most of them lived in a state of straining two ends across an impossible gulf, and the process reduced them to a condition of pessimism which blinded them to matters ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... Country Gazette tremendously. It wouldn't of course materially alter the methods or policy of the paper but it would make them all feel nobler, and Blenker was of that finer clay that does honestly want to feel nobler. He hated pessimism and all that criticism and self-examination that makes weak men pessimistic, he wanted to help weak men and be helped himself, he was all for that school of optimism that would have each dunghill was a well-upholstered throne, and his nervous, starry contributions to the talk were like patches ...
— The Wife of Sir Isaac Harman • H. G. (Herbert George) Wells
... you're giving way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself, you must look life in the face. I know it's ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life, it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and we are victims of a mirage. This personality, this sense of self, is ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... 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
... as the reunion of things unnaturally separated—the "recapitulatio" ([Greek: anakephalaiosis]).[484] This speculative thought, which involved the highest imaginable optimism in contrast to Gnostic pessimism, brought Irenaeus into touch with certain Pauline trains of thought,[485] and enabled him to adhere to the theology of the Apologists. At the same time it opened up a view of the person of Christ, which supplemented the great defect of that theology,[486] surpassed ...
— History of Dogma, Volume 2 (of 7) • Adolph Harnack
... 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 give ...
— Cooking and Dining in Imperial Rome • Apicius
... 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 ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... established, from the days of Abdelkader and "for certain reasons," his headquarters at Gafsa, where he sips absinthes past all computation, exercising his wit upon everybody and everything with a fluent and rather diverting pessimism. "You will probably perish on the road to Tozeur, ...
— Fountains In The Sand - Rambles Among The Oases Of Tunisia • Norman Douglas
... meals supplied. On this latter occasion Chirac (and his companion too) was quite optimistic, reiterating an absolute certitude that Paris could never be invested. Briefly, Sophia did not believe him. She believed the candidly despairing Chirac. She had no information, no wide theory, to justify her pessimism; nothing but the inward conviction that the race capable of behaving as she had seen it behave in the Place de la Concorde, was bound to be defeated. She loved the French race; but all the practical Teutonic sagacity in her wanted to take care of it ...
— The Old Wives' Tale • Arnold Bennett
... 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
... my stick upon the ground with a mighty ring of resolution, and the miracle is done. Who would take me for thirty now? From this moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism dishearten. I likewise undertake to ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... in most of the various phases—dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of being alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry, self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism, fixed belief in one's powerlessness, along whatever line it ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... The lad's 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 ...
— Two Gallant Sons of Devon - A Tale of the Days of Queen Bess • Harry Collingwood
... of 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 that directs ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... 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 are a power "on 'change," bid ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... work: that kind of bottle must grow; it cannot be 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
... leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... winds of weariness blew; I believed in my novels, I worked at my history, I had my art. I have come to recognize its absolute inadequacy, its complete incapacity to afford happiness. Then I understood that Pessimism was, at most, good to console those who had no real need of comfort; I understood that its theories, alluring when we are young, and rich, and well, become singularly weak and lamentably false, when age advances, when infirmities declare themselves, ...
— En Route • J.-K. (Joris-Karl) Huysmans
... you thought of as having a past. An adventurous girl, counting among those who were her followers a host of varied characters from Le Compte Davis, the bibliophile lawyer, chuckling over Schopenhauer's pessimism between hours of study over his law books, to Barney Oldfield, the racing driver, who deserted her to become a manufacturer; Jim Jeffries, former world's heavyweight pugilist, who was her companion in his fame and who left her to become a rancher; and Al Levy, who wined her and ...
— Spring Street - A Story of Los Angeles • James H. Richardson
... must be regarded as a confidential communication, since I am at present engaged in preparing a vest-pocket edition of the philosophical works of Schopenhauer in words of one syllable, and were it known that the publisher had intrusted the magnificent pessimism of that illustrious juggler of words and theories to a "moteless sunbeam" it might seriously interfere with the sale of the work; and I may say, too, that this request that my confidence be respected is entirely disinterested, inasmuch as ...
— The Water Ghost and Others • John Kendrick Bangs
... the issue of all the conflicts which threaten to cloud the future is impossible. We must steer clear of pessimism as of optimism; all we can say is that necessity will always finally bring things to an equilibrium. The world pursues its way without bothering itself with our speeches, and sooner or later we manage to adapt ourselves to the variations ...
— The Psychology of Revolution • Gustave le Bon
... and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored them. The earnest critic would hardly touch his name with a pair ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... impressions, some well-meaning uncle, or other fool, gave me a pessimistic book to read. This was a work of fiction which the British Public had hailed as a masterpiece of humour. It represented, with an utter fury of pessimism, the spiritual inadequacies of—but ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... exclamation points, and is written in a sort of 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
... the spacious provinces to which the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... to rout them out, but nine or ten in little more than as many lines is indeed reaching too near to poetry for good prose. This, however, is a trifle, and might pass if the tone of the writer was not so obviously that of cheap pessimism. I know not which is cheapest, pessimism or optimism. One forces lights, the other darks; both are equally untrue to good art, and equally sure of their effect with the groundlings. The one extenuates, the other sets down in malice. The first is ...
— Essays on Life, Art and Science • Samuel Butler
... Benson with cheerful pessimism. "The entire Red Butte Western outfit is tarred with the same stick. You haven't a dozen operators, all told, who haven't been discharged for incompetence, or worse, somewhere else; or a dozen conductors or engineers who weren't good and comfortably ...
— The Taming of Red Butte Western • Francis Lynde
... 241. Metaphysical and moral idealism, 242. The inherent difficulty in metaphysical idealism, 242. The swing from formalism to materialism. Pessimism, other-worldliness, mysticism, panlogism and aesthetic idealism, 243. Aesthetic idealism falsifies experience and discredits moral ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... is fascinated by the profound interest he displays when she speaks of herself. Besides, from what he tells her she gathers he is a man of genius, destroyed by pessimism, given to analyse human hearts and discover their misery, to look deeply into the lives of his fellow creatures, below the platitudes and conventionalities. He is richly endowed with the divine gift of sympathy, the supreme art of discrimination, ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... 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 was. He was majestic. He would have attracted attention in any gathering, ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... your labour and your youth, to throw yourself into a struggle which without money is hopeless. Remember that there was a time when I too was young. I too saw these things as you and Brooks see them to-day. I do not wish to preach pessimism to you. I fought and was worsted. So will you be. The whole thing is a vast chimera, a jest of the God you have made for yourself. But as long as the world lasts the young will have to buy knowledge—as I have bought it. Don't go into the fray empty-handed—it ...
— A Prince of Sinners • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... what they make of pain. The theory of Buddhism, which now has more followers than any other faith, is founded on four axioms, which are called "the four excellent truths." The first and fundamental one is: "Pain is inseparable from existence." This is the principle of all pessimism, ancient and modern. Schopenhauer, an out-and-out pessimist, lays down the allied maxim, "All pleasure is negative, that is, it consists in getting rid of a want or pain,"[13-1] a principle expressed before his time in the saying "the highest pleasure ...
— The Religious Sentiment - Its Source and Aim: A Contribution to the Science and - Philosophy of Religion • Daniel G. Brinton
... 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 ...
— India's Problem Krishna or Christ • John P. Jones
... he summoned the spirit to flash upon her his old smile in farewell and she waved as though she were speeding him on some errand of festival. Then while old Aaron paced the dooryard with a grim face of pessimism bowed low over his chest, she turned into the house and, beside the bed where her lover had so long lain, dropped to her knees and clasped her hands ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... 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 ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... ought to enjoy the joke of what's going on here," I wrote, "but somehow it doesn't amuse me. Pessimism on the contrary possesses me and cynicism deeply engages. I positively feel my own flesh sore from the brass nails in Neil Paraday's social harness. The house is full of people who like him, as they mention, awfully, and with whom his talent for talking nonsense ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... 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; ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... 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 ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... of the West. It refused all significance to the temporal world; it took 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
... (the younger), Ulrici, Trendelenburg, and Hermann Lotze. Lotze. in his Microcosm, has unfolded, in a style attractive to the general reader, profound and genial views of man, nature, and religion. A remarkable phenomenon in German speculation is "pessimism,"—the doctrine gravely propounded in the systems of Schopenhauer and E. Von Hartmann, that the world is radically and essentially evil, and personal existence a curse from which the refuge is in the hope of annihilation. In its view of the world ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... vices of the American people. There is a popular 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 the ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... head, and after sitting for some time in silence, went ashore with the cook and drank himself into a state of hopeless pessimism. In this condition he forgave everybody, and feeling very low, made his will by the simple process of giving his knife to Dick and two and sevenpence to Henry. The trouble he had in revoking it next morning furnished a striking illustration ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... is the lot of man when considered in his relations to creatures and to the world. It is a lot full of uncertainty, of instability, of vicissitude; but this should not make us skeptical or cynical; it affords no justification for pessimism. It is a condition arising, on the one hand, from the very nature of limited beings, and on the other, from the vast potentialities of our souls, which, while they are limited in giving to others, cannot be appeased except by the God who made them. There is a craving in the heart ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan |
