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More "Optimistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... hundred pounds of these hoppes are commonly worth 26s. 8d., one acre of ground and the third part of one man's labour with small cost beside, shall yield unto him that ordereth the same well, fortie marks yearly and that for ever,' an optimistic estimate that many growers to-day would like to see realized. 'In the preparation of a hop garden', says the same writer, 'if your ground be grasse, it should be first sowen with hempe or beanes which maketh the ground melowe, ...
— A Short History of English Agriculture • W. H. R. Curtler
... close-fisted people—you had only to look at Mr. Batty's mouth—would not be giving a ball at all, but they had their eyes on Miss Henrietta for that half-witted son of theirs. She was sure of it. And Miss Caroline was not fit to go, it would be the death of her. Cook was optimistic. It would do Miss Caroline good; she was always the better for a ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution wherein he has refused admiration and respect for the crimes then committed, ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... gradually lightened with a faint glimmer of satisfaction. His mind, seeking for a straw, caught at a possible way out of this labyrinth of difficulties and in a moment he had straightened up, puffing veritable optimistic wreaths. He arose buoyantly; before he reached the inn the crumb of comfort had ...
— The Strollers • Frederic S. Isham
... place we must issue an optimistic report—this very day!" he said, smiling. "The cash-box is nearly empty—good! Then we will state that the workers have abundant means to carry on the fight for another year if need be, and then ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... prioritizing infrastructure development, education, housing development, jobs programs, and economic reform over the next year. Growing political stability and continued international commitment to Afghan reconstruction create an optimistic outlook for maintaining improvements to the Afghan economy in 2004. The replacement of the opium trade - which may account for one-third of GDP - is one of several potential spoilers for the economy over ...
— The 2004 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... the grievous spectacle of poets and writers who are constantly expressing their anxiety lest it disappear with them, and yet devote themselves unremittingly to its cultivation, with all the ardor of despair. At their side, however, we see optimistic dreamers, worthy disciples of the prophets. In the midst of the ruin of all that made the past glorious, and in the face of the downfall of cherished hopes, they lose not an iota of their faith in the future of their people, in ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... them that there are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is not at all sure that the world is wrong in its doubt ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... listened to him with her eyes fixed steadily on his own. As a matter of fact, she had shown neither hope nor excitement from the moment he came back to her and started to tell his message. But if she showed neither hope nor excitement for herself, surely she gave Dick still fewer grounds for any optimistic foresights. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... becoming power to act. Behind Crerar was a sullen but optimistic reformation of such varied emotional character that none but a quiet, steady man could have controlled it in Winnipeg. The novelist's prairie farm was now a power in the land. It was Agrarianism; that had bolted like an ostrich both old parties in the West, ...
— The Masques of Ottawa • Domino
... like to go up against Mr. McMurren. He is the disease man. He is the last word in the government. I am only a second fiddle when it comes to diseases but I must say that I have not a very optimistic feeling over the blight situation. I have been depending very largely on him to ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... legal and political forces during the period of Conquest) was now chairman of the Board, and he and the President successfully readjusted the heterogeneous mass of bonds and stocks, notes and prior liens, taking advantage of a period of optimistic feeling in the market to float a tremendous general mortgage. When this "Readjustment" had been successfully put through, the burden was some forty or fifty millions larger than before,—where those millions went is one of the mysteries to reward that future Carlyle!—but ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... boys, as to whose capabilities to write a topping revue Miss Verepoint had formed so optimistic an estimate, proved to be well-grown lads of about forty-five and forty, respectively. Of the two, Roland thought that perhaps R. P. de Parys was a shade the more obnoxious, but a closer inspection left him with the feeling that ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... he did not receive an answer at once, although he realised what a blow it would be to her. He understood that, to begin with, it would destroy all her dreams, as it had already destroyed. But he relied on her optimistic nature, which he had never known surpassed, and on the depth of her purpose in all that she undertook. He knew that she drew strength and resolution from all that was deepest ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... At times words flamed perilously high. For months the solutions of the Adriatic, the Austrian, Turkish, and Thracian problems hung in poignant suspense, the public looking on with diminishing interest and waxing dissatisfaction. The usual optimistic assurances that all would soon run smoothly and swiftly fell upon deaf ears. Faith in the ...
— The Inside Story Of The Peace Conference • Emile Joseph Dillon
... into this reply very carefully. If he had hopes of winning Nora Harrigan, optimistic he certainly must be. Perhaps it was not optimism. Rather might it not be a purpose made of steel, bendable but not breakable, reinforced by a knowledge of conditions which she would have ...
— The Place of Honeymoons • Harold MacGrath
... Aunt Ella, though naturally optimistic, did not, in her own heart, share Alice's hopeful anticipations. Perhaps Florence's somewhat extravagant account of the collision and the events which followed it led her to form the opinion that her nephew's escape ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... although the apostles were discussing the abstract problems of freewill and utilitarianism, they were no doubt keenly interested in concrete history. No one was more moved than Fitzjames. He speaks of the optimistic views which were popular with the Liberals after 1832, expounded by Cobden and Bright and supposed to be sanctioned by the Exhibition of 1851. It was the favourite cant that Captain Pen 'had got the best of Captain Sword, and that henceforth the kindly earth ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... die in time and acquire peace. And then they'll know the truth, for it never comes except in the society of worms. Have I got the essence of your optimistic philosophy down right, ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... wardrobe at command, it would be mere self-denial to be faithful to one's self. I leave that to the one-I'd who can see only one side of a question. Said Tennyson to a friend (who printed it): "'In Memoriam' is more optimistic than I am"; and there is more of the real man in that little remark than in all the biographies. The published prophet has to live up to his public halo. So have I seen an actress on tour slip from a third-class railway carriage into a brougham. ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... the founders, although as the Mazzini rather than as the Cavour of the Norse Risorgimento. And whatever may be the future of the land that claims him for her own, his spirit will walk abroad long after he has ceased to live among men. His large, genial, optimistic personality is of the sort that cannot fail to stamp itself upon other generations than the one that actually counts him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... Wagner's first conception of Siegfried changed in the course of years; and in spite of the magnificent denouement of Goetterdaemmerung (which is really more effective in a concert room, for the real tragedy ends with Siegfried's death), I cannot help thinking with regret how fine a more optimistic poem from this revolutionary of '48 might have been. People tell me that it would then have been less true to life. But why should it be truthful to depict life only as a bad thing? Life is neither good nor bad it is just what we make it, and the result of ...
— Musicians of To-Day • Romain Rolland
... too pessimistic; higher thought enthusiasts are often too optimistic. While the former poisoned their lives and paralyzed their God-given faculties and powers by dismal dread of hell's fire and damnation, our modern healers and Scientists have drifted to the other ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... girl, did not linger long on the optimistic prospect. For to-night at least, "telling" seemed a matter too dreadful to contemplate. Colonel Dalhousie was an irascible and solitary widower with one son whom he had once been proud of; and this son, having been strangely compelled to take a lady's word ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... of this start, dinner passed in relative quiet. For the most part, they talked about the remaining chances of selling the collection, about which nobody was optimistic. Rand tried to build up morale with pictures of large museums and important dealers, all fairly slavering to get their fangs into the Fleming collection, but to little avail. A pall of gloom had settled, and he was forced to concede ...
— Murder in the Gunroom • Henry Beam Piper
... Genevieve adjusted the down-sweeping, golden-brown tress over her right eye, brushed an invisible speck from the piano, straightened a rose in a vase, and after these traditionally bridal preparations, waited with a bride's optimistic smile the advent of a caller. But it was Marie who appeared at the door, with a stricken ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... attempted to give her any of her confidence. Everything at home, in short, was difficult and confused. Nobody was happy, nobody was natural. Even her own private history, if she looked into it too closely, did not show her any very optimistic colours. She had not seen Johnny St. Leath now for a fortnight, nor heard from him, and those precious words under the Arden Gate one evening were beginning already to appear a dim unsubstantial dream. However, if there was one quality that ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... medicine, recognized that there was a specific affinity of disease for individuals with more or less the same characteristic somatic and psychic traits and trends. Tuberculosis, for instance, was noted for its frequency in long-skeletoned, thin persons, remarkably optimistic. And the plethoric, choleric nature of the sufferer from gout has become proverbial. Before the era of the great bacteriologic discoveries of the eighties and nineties, the concordance of esoteric racial ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... face still buried in his hands, endured the slow passage of the doleful afternoon. Unlike the prisoner at The Lash, who, by a coincidence that happily illustrates the dispensations of Providence, was undergoing at the same moment an identical ordeal, the Baron had no optimistic, whimsical philosophy to fall back upon. Instead, he had a most tender sense of personal dignity that had been egregiously outraged—and also a wife. Indeed, the thought of Alicia and of Alicia's parent was alone enough to keep his head ...
— Count Bunker • J. Storer Clouston
... bearing when she had learned all. Of course, he told himself, he must not take any notice of her wild suggestion that he and Cleo must part and that their marriage didn't count; nor did he permit himself to be allured by her optimistic pre-perception of the future. Noble heart that she was, she had been striving to lessen his pain. He felt he understood what had prompted her every word. And the readiness with which she had bowed her head in acceptance of the emotional position as soon ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... was a large woman well advanced beyond that indefinite turning-point of middle age; in her unattractive face was none of the easy good nature so unmistakably stamped upon her husband's. Peter J. was inherently optimistic; his head was forever hidden in a roseate aura of hopefulness and expectation. Under easy living he had grayed and fattened; his eyes were small and colorless, his cheeks full and veined with tiny sprays Of purple, his hands soft and limber. What had once been a measure of ...
— The Auction Block • Rex Beach
... sentinels conversed but little. The outer war of the elements was disturbing, and Christobal, though unfailingly optimistic in his speech, was nevertheless a prey to dark forebodings. Once, they were startled by the fall of an avalanche, which thundered down a mountain side on the farther shore, and tore a great gap in the belt of trees until it ...
— The Captain of the Kansas • Louis Tracy
... expanding, and fundamentally sound. But in any realistic appraisal, even the optimistic analyst will realize that in a prosperous period the principal threat to efficient functioning of a free enterprise system is inflation. We look back on four years of prosperous activities during which prices, the cost of living, have been relatively stable—that is, inflation ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... correctly a conversation of mine, of rather an optimistic nature, as to the possibilities and probabilities of arbitration, and the improvement of the customs of war; but in another quarter matters have not gone so well: the "Corriere della Sera" of Milan publishes a ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... my injuries. The only information I had received had been included in vague remarks intended as soothing, such as "You're all right, old man." "You'll pull through fine." "You're coming along nicely." But all of it had seemed too professionally optimistic to satisfy me and ...
— "And they thought we wouldn't fight" • Floyd Gibbons
... these physical betterments comes a changed mental attitude, whereby the former pessimistic outlook has been changed to an optimistic view of life. The former abnormal timidity of the student has been replaced by a perfect confidence; the old unreasoning fear-of-failure is transformed into a feeling of supreme self-reliance; and ...
— Stammering, Its Cause and Cure • Benjamin Nathaniel Bogue
... Kate, helping to beautify the grounds. A wide hedge of the little wild rosebushes which grew plentifully along the headlands, was set out behind where the house was to stand, to divide the lawn from the garden, Pearl said, and although to the ordinary eye they were a weedy looking lot, to Pearl's optimistic vision they, were already aglow with fragrant bloom. Aunt Kate sent down east to her sister Lib for roots of sweet Mary, ribbon-grass, and live-forever, all of which came, took root, and grew in the ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... sunshine—a slight-built man in a turned-down collar, with a thin and fair moustache, and a faint bluish tint on one side of his high forehead, caused by a network of thin veins. His face had something of the youthful, optimistic, stained-glass look peculiar to the refined English type. He walked elastically, yet with trim precision, as if he had a pleasant taste in furniture and churches, and held the Spectator in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... like art, is therefore doubly gratifying as a life's work. I know—and it will bear repeating—no other profession that holds so much of bigness and of fullness of life generally. Engineers themselves reflect it. Usually robust, always active, generally optimistic, engineers as a group swing through life—and have swung through life from the beginnings of the profession—without thought of publicity, for instance, or need or desire for it. Their work alone engrossed their minds. It was enough—it is enough—and more. And that ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... time to Irving, though treating Columbus with less fulness of detail, came the polished historian Prescott, whose "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" was published in 1837. This ardent and laborious scholar was, like Irving, constitutionally inclined to the optimistic view of his leading characters. To magnify the virtues and to minimize the faults of their heroes has always been the besetting sin of biographers. The pomp and picturesque circumstance of the Spanish court, the ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... festivities she would be the only girl of suitable age to be thus slighted; it seemed clear to the juvenile mind, therefore, that neither she nor her descendants would ever recover from such a blow. But, under all the circumstances, would she be allowed to join in the procession? Even Rebecca, the optimistic, feared not, and the committee confirmed her fears by saying that Abner Simpson's daughter certainly could not take any prominent part in the ceremony, but that they hoped Mrs. Fogg would allow ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... such a contingency and provided for it," replied Uncle Ben, with his optimistic manner. "I realize that you all go to school and afternoons after school do not give you much time to experiment on these machines, so I found two young men who used to do good work for us who were pleased to come out here for a few weeks and ...
— The Blue Birds' Winter Nest • Lillian Elizabeth Roy
... the job the work went on very rapidly, yet without error. The Celestial Queen was finished, tested, and found perfect, one full day ahead of James' most optimistic estimate for construction ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... transport ramming and sinking one U-boat. Two honest lads of one of our own forward gun crews say that our ship bumped over another. They felt the bump. Perhaps they did, but bluejackets at twenty years of age are apt to be optimistic, as witness: ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... in the blue sky on the following morning (April 8). Clarence Island showed clearly on the horizon, and Elephant Island could also be distinguished. The single snow-clad peak of Clarence Island stood up as a beacon of safety, though the most optimistic imagination could not make an easy path of the ice and ocean that separated us from that ...
— South! • Sir Ernest Shackleton
... problem of its shell of nonessentials. He had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success—that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; but, to get her whole ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... regard as the showy but unsubstantial personality of the young god; and the natural antagonism of light and darkness, hope and despair, is as amusingly parodied in the mock deference and ill-disguised aversion with which he approaches them. Apollo finally vindicates Mr. Browning's optimistic theism by claiming the gifts of Bacchus, youngest of the gods, for the beneficent purpose ...
— A Handbook to the Works of Browning (6th ed.) • Mrs. Sutherland Orr
... made with a good-nature decidedly optimistic, as could be seen, when the fiacre finally drew up at the given address. It was that of a very modest restaurant decorated with this signboard: 'Trattoria al Marzocco.' And the 'Marzocco', the lion symbolical of Florence, was represented above the ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Testament. Dr Schmidt, to whom Borrow turned for advice and information, was apparently very busily occupied with his own affairs, which included the compilation of a Mongolian Grammar and Dictionary. The Doctor was optimistic, and promised to make enquiries about the steps to be taken to obtain the necessary permission to print; but Borrow heard nothing ...
— The Life of George Borrow • Herbert Jenkins
... optimistic. From the sofa of the morning-room, where she sat knitting, she said: "Well, YOU'VE had a fine morning's gadding about I must say! How are you? ...
— The Getting of Wisdom • Henry Handel Richardson
... West had responded nobly to his editorial appeals to come out and help found an Empire. The majority of the optimistic citizens who walked with their heads in the clouds and their eyes on the roseate future were there through his efforts. Appreciative of this fact, the Major's eyes were kindly as they gazed upon the editor's ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... no more deduce the necessity for the eventual appearance of "moving equilibria" of harmonious totalities than Hegel could guarantee the "higher unities" in which all contradictions should be reconciled. In Spencer's hands the theory of evolution acquired a more decidedly optimistic character than in Darwin's; but I shall deal later with the relation of Darwin's hypothesis to the opposition of ...
— Evolution in Modern Thought • Ernst Haeckel
... like a child. His face was very calm and intensely optimistic. 'He told me he had slept through big guns' fire on his ship,' I said admiringly. 'He has ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... altogether different from any other magazine,—literary and popular and artistic all at once. Also it was to have an "uplift"—they were just beginning to use that canting term and Bunker's did much to popularize it. The magazine was to be intensely American in spirit, optimistic and enthusiastic in tone, and very chummy with its readers. Each month it discussed confidentially with "our readers" the glorious success of the previous issue and the astonishing triumphs in the way of amusement and instruction that were to be expected in the future.... All this Milly gathered ...
— One Woman's Life • Robert Herrick
... him to love the city so well; he saw his reflection in it; and, like it, he was grimy, big, careless, rich, strong, and unquenchably optimistic. From the deepest of his inside all the way out he believed it was the finest city in the world. "Finest" was his word. He thought of it as his city as he thought of his family as his family; and just as profoundly believed ...
— The Turmoil - A Novel • Booth Tarkington
... the broad principles contained in Mr. Mahaffy's clever little book, and many of them will, no doubt, commend themselves to our readers. The maxim, 'If you find the company dull, blame yourself,' seems to us somewhat optimistic, and we have no sympathy at all with the professional story-teller who is really a great bore at a dinner-table; but Mr. Mahaffy is quite right in insisting that no bright social intercourse is possible without equality, and it is no objection to his ...
— Reviews • Oscar Wilde
... Decadence, Henry Sidgwick Memorial Lecture, by the Rt. Hon. Arthur James Balfour, M.P., 1908. Mr Balfour has perceived the problem in a more optimistic manner than Professor Eucken; but he, too, is conscious that much is required of the people. "Some kind of widespread exhilaration or excitement is required in order to enable any community to extract the best results ...
— An Interpretation of Rudolf Eucken's Philosophy • W. Tudor Jones
... Sir Robert Peel, as is well known, did not fall into this error, and even Mr. Cobden appears to have recognised so early as 1849 that his original forecasts on this point were too optimistic. Speaking on January 10, 1849, he said: "At the last stage of the Anti-Corn Law Agitation, our opponents were driven to this position: 'Free Trade is a very good thing, but you cannot have it until other countries ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... suitable for cultivation was to be divided with at least 100 acres to be given for each share of stock. The tract Nova Britannia of 1609, written by Robert Johnson as a part of the promotional campaign of the London Company, outlined these major provisions concerning land and included the optimistic prediction that each share of L12 10s. would be worth 500 acres at least. But an attempt fourteen years later by Captain Martin to justify a patent based on this figure of 500 acres per share failed because the promise was held to be the work of a private individual and not ...
— Mother Earth - Land Grants in Virginia 1607-1699 • W. Stitt Robinson, Jr.
... end of the week. The men, also, will camel. There is, indeed, no alternative between camelling and sandcarting—sandcarting not recommended by the faculty but insisted upon by Cleopatra. Hope it will work out all right; and am inclined to be optimistic. A week in the desert and the flowery oasis of the Fayum, with the two most charming women in Egypt! There will be others, but there's a man each, and more. I shall have to look after Monny and Brigit, as Anthony is ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... during the winter, the German authorities had good reason to feel optimistic about the coming spring campaign. They knew that they had increased their munition output enormously, and their spies told them that Russia had practically run out of ammunition, while England had not yet awakened to the realisation that this is ...
— The Land of Deepening Shadow - Germany-at-War • D. Thomas Curtin
... inwardly straining to be better, that we are easily fooled into supposing that some slight easement of external circumstance will at once release the progressive forces of mankind and save the race. When, for example, one compares the immense amount of optimistic expectancy about a warless world with the small amount of radical thinking as to what really is the matter with us, he may well be amazed at the unfounded regnancy of the idea of progress. We rejoice over some slight disarmament as though that were the cure of our international shame, ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... has not a little of the shrewd common-sense and the homely and unliterary directness of Franklin. He is not without a share of the aspiration and the elevation of Emerson; and he has a philosophy of his own as optimistic as Emerson's. He possesses also somewhat of Hawthorne's interest in ethical problems, with something of the same power of getting at the heart of them; he, too, has written his parables and apologs ...
— Inquiries and Opinions • Brander Matthews
... childishly optimistic!" he snapped as I began to congratulate him on the victory his ditch had given us. "Our troubles ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... not possible to be optimistic about the future of the Australian blacks. The race seems doomed to perish. Something can be done to prolong their life, to make it more pleasant; but they will never be a people, never take any share in the development of the continent which ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... us is optimistic enough to hope that the men who sit in the mighty positions are going to make a better show of themselves than their predecessors did over the trust problem? It strains hope a little too much. Those ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... Servia met with complete success, and as a result that country on July 25th, and before the expiration of the ultimatum, made a reply to Austria which astonished the world with its spirit of conciliation and for a short time gave rise to optimistic ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... to reach unusual heights. Next the sanguine, hard or soft, as hope or enjoyment have the upper hand in them; this is the richest group in attractive power. If hope is the stronger factor there is a fund of energy which, allied with the power of charm and persuasion, with trustfulness in good, and optimistic outlook on the world, wins its way and succeeds in its undertakings, making its appeal to the will rather than to the mind. On the softer side of this type are found the disappointing people who ought to do well, and always fail, for whom the joie de vivre carries everything before ...
— The Education of Catholic Girls • Janet Erskine Stuart
... amount of optimistic theology or philosophy can restore the child's leg, or ears, or eyes. It is utter nonsense to say that miracles like these can ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... quite so optimistic as all that," he laughed. "But I really think we have a chance. ...
— Doubloons—and the Girl • John Maxwell Forbes
... some optimistic persons who believe, or affect to believe, that Christianity is in due course destined to replace the ancient faiths in Japan. They point to what was effected by St. Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century, and they imagine that the Japan of the twentieth ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... they drove along they talked of the improvement on the farm and the profit they ought to be able to earn with the new equipment. Bob was the optimist and his uncle the pessimist in these discussions, but optimistic Bob was not without his pencil and memorandum book and usually had the better of the argument because of his uncle's disinclination to take the time to figure out the advantages and disadvantages of ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... the Indian barrister—we quote his words because they seem to us worthy of notice at home—"that a Christian Government is unable to legislate to save the children of Temple women? I am sorry my opinion has made you sad. Giving my opinion as a lawyer, I could not take an optimistic view of the matter. The law as it stands at present is against reform in matters of this kind. Even should a good judge take a strong view of the matter, the High Court will stick to the ...
— Lotus Buds • Amy Carmichael
... Lou did not fulfil the country practitioner's optimistic prophecy. The change in her condition, as day after day crept by, growing longer and colder, was almost imperceptible; but it was steadily for the worse. The mountain winter closed in with unusual rigors, and Smiles' cabin continued to be a hospital where she passed her hours ministering equally ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... Latins, to the land of shades. No Briton, Gaul, or Irish could have understood the melancholy words of Achilles: "Seek not, glorious Ulysses, to comfort me for death; rather would I till the ground for wages on some poor man's small estate than reign over all the dead."[5] The race was an optimistic one. It made the best of life, ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... the same year a report was circulated that he was out of debt, but from Vienna, whither he had gone to live, came a laconic cablegram nailing the optimistic impeachment: ...
— Stories of Authors, British and American • Edwin Watts Chubb
... social activity. How far we can succeed in furthering that aim I need not attempt to say. But I will conclude by reverting to some thoughts at which I hinted at starting. You may think that I have hardly spoken in a very sanguine or optimistic tone. I have certainly admitted the existence of enormous difficulties and the probabilities of very imperfect success. I cannot think that the promised land of which we are taking a Pisgah sight is so near or the view ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... peeled them for supper His crippled leg was thrust out straight, his hat was perched precariously over one ear because of the slanting sun rays through the window, and a half-smoked cigarette waggled uncertainly in the corner of his mouth while he sang dolefully a most optimistic ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... a kind of back-water. Perhaps the most well known of the remaining newspapers was the Court Journal, which was published in a dusty but genteel-looking office just out of Kensington High Street. For when all the papers of a people have been for years growing more and more dim and decorous and optimistic, the dimmest and most decorous and most optimistic is very likely to win. In the journalistic competition which was still going on at the beginning of the twentieth century, the final victor ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... flitted across the curtain in its direction, and then another, until in his mind's eye he beheld Margaret Elizabeth and Uncle Bob seated beside the hearth. For aught he knew, it might be Augustus McAllister making an evening call, but the Candy Man was just then too determinedly optimistic to ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... sick heart; so did the dutiful cheerfulness of his men and his brother officers. They overdid it, he realized, and the efforts they so conscientiously made showed how deep their sympathy must be, and how tragic the cause of it. His lips twisted sardonically as he remembered their optimistic predictions of his immediate recovery and the tributes they paid to his courage in the field. It was true he had distinguished himself in action (by chance, he assured himself and them), and he had figured as a hero in the subsequent reports of the battle. But the other fellows would ...
— Many Kingdoms • Elizabeth Jordan
... recall I have spent my adult life going, as it were, in one direction and it is now not a matter of merely retracing my steps, but of starting out for an entirely different destination in a field where there are no highwaymaps and few compasspoints. I cannot say I am even optimistic of success, but it is not for want of trying—be ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... first gun of the campaign, and summoned to the field various contending forces, armed with ridicule, argument, or an optimistic diplomacy, urging an immediate surrender of the ground claimed. Bills favoring the enfranchisement of women were discussed both in the Territorial Council Chamber and in the lower House of the legislature. ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... for the head of the Austrians to say, isn't it? We always expected victory; but even the most optimistic of us were surprised at what ...
— New York Times Current History: The European War, Vol 2, No. 1, April, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... blue, and all about the wall and even across part of the ceiling had been draped festoon after festoon of fishnet. Only this was not real fishnet, as a closer inspection showed. It had been cunningly painted! In the dim light, and to a person with an optimistic imagination, the illusion was almost perfect. Nan choked suddenly at the sight of this; then her eyes widened to a baby stare, and she become ...
— The Gray Dawn • Stewart Edward White
... in an area in which even the optimistic Ordnance Survey (who in the chatty little notes they append to their maps, characterised the local water supply as "abundant though varying in quality") considered wheeled transport as impracticable. In consequence our nodding acquaintanceship with camels ripened quickly ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... a curious internal sinking. Eileen was too deliriously optimistic about those children. They were angel babies, of course, for Eileen said so, but Eveley remembered Nathalie and Dan, angels, too,—but how they shouted and tore through the house. And they were always exhibiting ...
— Eve to the Rescue • Ethel Hueston
... all his great inventions has been signalized by patient, persistent, and incessant effort which, recognizing nothing short of success, has resulted in the ultimate accomplishment of his ideas. Optimistic and hopeful to a high degree, Edison has the happy faculty of beginning the day as open-minded as a child—yesterday's disappointments and failures discarded and discounted by the alluring ...
— Edison, His Life and Inventions • Frank Lewis Dyer and Thomas Commerford Martin
... office, and telephone messages to Santa Ysobel and the Palace Hotel had failed to locate him. When I believed I had Skeels firmly clasped in the jaws of the Ensenada trap, I had sent a complete report of my doings up to that time, and the optimistic outlook then, to Barbara with instructions for her to get it to Worth. She would know where ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... author of "Is Life Worth Living?" He was the only man. Professor Ruskin said, who really understood him—referring to "The New Republic." But while Mallock saw the reactionary and pessimistic side of his Oxford teacher, there was a progressist and optimistic side which does not appear in his "Mr. Herbert." That was discovered by another man whose career, short as it was, proved even more influential. Arnold Toynbee was one of the Professor's warmest admirers and ablest pupils: and in his philanthropic work the teaching of "Unto this Last" ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... been afraid," he went on. "I wasn't going home with them. I want to stop and watch these ridiculous people a little longer.... What had you got to say, my philosophical, optimistic friend?" ...
— The Secret City • Hugh Walpole
... interest rates down, but this policy proved unsustainable, and in early December 1997 the Central Bank let interest rates rise sharply. As the year ended, Russian authorities were attempting to put the best face on the financial situation, while at the same time scaling back their previous optimistic growth projections for 1998 to 1%-2%. Because of Russia's severe macroeconomic constraints, resources allocated to the military sector have declined sharply since the implosion of the USSR in ...
— The 1998 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... to understand how optimism should become of the tissue of American life. The pioneer must hope. Else, how can he press on? The American editor or writer who fails to strike the optimistic note is set upon with a ferocity which becomes clear if we bear in mind that hope is the pioneer's preserving arm. I do not mean to discredit the validity of hope and optimism. I can honestly lay claim to both. America was builded on a ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... he wrote his mother, "I think I should become as optimistic as the Secretary of Agriculture, even though the total produce of the original thirteen states should supply a still smaller fraction of the necessities of life required by their population. The Congressional ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... privilege to be the husband of Allatu. The substitute of the fierce sun of the summer solstice for the sun of spring is a most interesting symptom of the direction taken by the Babylonian beliefs, regarding the fate of the dead. It may be that in the earlier period, when more optimistic views of Aralu were current, Gula, who is called the one 'who restores the dead to life,' may have had a place in the pantheon of the lower world; not that the Babylonians at any time believed in the return ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... arguments were taken seriously by the others and a gloom came over the gathered gossips. But the inn-keeper, who was always optimistic, replied: ...
— Defenders of Democracy • Militia of Mercy
... of the machines had been seen moving towards the Thames, and one, by a happy chance, had been destroyed. In the other cases the shells had missed, and the batteries had been at once annihilated by the Heat-Rays. Heavy losses of soldiers were mentioned, but the tone of the dispatch was optimistic. ...
— The War of the Worlds • H. G. Wells
... this optimistic prophecy was a noncommittal grunt, accompanied by a slight outthrust and uplift of the chin, a pursing of the lips and the ghost of a sardonic little smile. Only an Irishman can get the right tempo to that grunt—and the tempo is everything. In the case ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... the lips of chauffeurs uncurled into not unkindly smiles. Policemen whistled at their posts—clerks, on their way to work; beggars approached the task of trying to persuade perfect strangers to bear the burden of their maintenance with that optimistic vim which makes all the difference. It was ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... In that case the poorest will be able to earn "three square meals a day," like the Australians themselves; and while English butchers suffer (for some one must suffer in all great revolutions), smiling Plenty will walk through our land studying a cookery-book. There are optimistic thinkers, who gravely argue that the serious desires of humanity are the pledges of their own future fulfilment. If that be correct, the Australian myth may be founded on fact. There is no desire more deep-rooted in our perishable ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... soul has risen, one need not be unduly optimistic to presume that, in spite of opposition, it will meet no enemies which it will not conquer, and find no heights which it will not be able to scale. Prophecy is the art of reading history forward. The spirit having come thus far, it is not possible to believe that it can ever permanently revert ...
— The Ascent of the Soul • Amory H. Bradford
... did not feel any too optimistic. Holding down Hynds House was no easy task, and the town was not disposed to make it easier for us. While we had been busy renovating, while our hands were so full of work that every minute was occupied, we hadn't felt our isolation. It was only when we had time to pause and look around us, that ...
— A Woman Named Smith • Marie Conway Oemler
... imagine. I shall be a riot. I know just the sort of stuff that's needed—simple, manly, optimistic stuff straight from the shoulder. This shoulder," said Gussie, tapping. "Why I was so nervous this morning I can't imagine. For anything simpler than distributing a few footling books to a bunch of grimy-faced kids I can't imagine. Still, for some reason I can't imagine, I was feeling ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... learned to know the world better than many who are in contact with it for long periods, but who see all through the distorted medium of their own prejudices or exceptional experiences. Although she was no longer unsophisticated she was neither cynical nor optimistic. Before her hope could be fulfilled she knew she must enter society, and she studied it thoughtfully—its whims and meannesses as well as its laws and refinements. If she ever reached Graydon's side she meant to stand there ...
— A Young Girl's Wooing • E. P. Roe
... for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies, but economic growth has remained sluggish. Sao Tome is also optimistic that significant petroleum discoveries are forthcoming in its territorial waters in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea. Corruption scandals continue to weaken ...
— The 2000 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... "V-I" was brought before the notice of the German military department the pressing point concerning its military recommendations arose at once. The inventor had foreseen this issue and was optimistic. Thereupon the authorities asked if the inventor were prepared to justify his claims. The retort was positive. Forthwith the Junkers decided to submit it to ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... dining cars is forbidden, and the traveler may not even drink from his own flask. Congress is being urged by senators and congressmen, as well as by anti-saloon advocates, to pass laws prohibiting common carriers from delivering alcoholics to any "dry" community. The more optimistic anti-saloon workers believe it is but a matter of a short time when Congress will pass laws prohibiting the manufacture or sale of alcoholic beverages within any limits protected by the United ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... phthisis and mental disease, Ziehen remarks that the tuberculous are often observed to be optimistic but that other cases show a hypochondriacal depression with egocentric narrowing of interests. He speaks of a sort of rudimentary delusional disorder looking in the direction of jealousy in certain cases. Pronounced mental disorder occurs rarely in tuberculosis, according ...
— The Journal of Abnormal Psychology - Volume 10
... mud and blood of a trench, with no opportunity to bathe or even to wash his hands and face, with none too much food, with many of his comrades dead or wounded, with a shell-storm shrieking and howling about him, and has then had to surrender, could hardly be expected to appear high-spirited and optimistic. Yet it has long been the custom of the Allied correspondents and observers to base their assertions that the morale of the enemy is weakening and that the quality of his troops is deteriorating on the demeanor of prisoners fresh ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... all the time, calling Mayday. I think it was Bish Ware who told me that Mayday didn't have anything to do with the day after the last of April; it was Old Terran French, m'aidez, meaning "help me." I wondered how Bish was getting along, and I wasn't too optimistic ...
— Four-Day Planet • Henry Beam Piper
... let us forget that he launched, before the famous prediction of von der Goltz, this optimistic view well calculated to rekindle the zeal of generals who struggle under the weight of enormous tasks incident to ...
— Battle Studies • Colonel Charles-Jean-Jacques-Joseph Ardant du Picq
... "You see," said the optimistic Rowley, "water's the main thing after all. If we happen to strike river gold, thar's the stream for washing it; if we happen to drop into quartz—and that thar rock looks mighty likely—thar ain't a more natural-born site for a mill than that right bank, with water enough to run ...
— The Heritage of Dedlow Marsh and Other Tales • Bret Harte
... of his birth the career of a man of leisure was completely practicable. During his long absence from home his family had sent him at intervals copies of the local newspapers—sheets whose utterances were triumphantly optimistic, even beyond their triumphant and optimistic wont. Furthermore, his courses over the Continent had brought him into contact with many travellers more lately from home than himself, whose strange and topping tales—carried, indeed, in a direction the reverse ...
— With the Procession • Henry B. Fuller
... brightly enough to all appearance in the spacious rooms and gardens of Clewes and in expeditions among the neighboring fells. But to Ian it seemed rather an anxious pause in life. His work was at a stand-still, yet whatever the optimistic Aunt Beatrice might affirm, he could not feel that the shadow was lifting from his wife's mind. To others she appeared cheerful in the quiet, serious way that had always been hers, but he saw that her whole attitude towards life, especially in her wistful, yearning ...
— The Invader - A Novel • Margaret L. Woods
... more optimistic members of the chorus thought that this might show some connection with the Church of England. But Mrs. ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... to above. That there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. Unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. That there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that I agree with the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry in stating that: "I have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism of the ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... the town for more than another seven or eight years even if the flow needed to maintain adequate water quality is left out of account, and the summers of 1965 and 1966 made even those figures seem slightly optimistic. Both city and State have declared themselves in favor of an upstream major reservoir at Sixes Bridge, also a 1963 proposal. And elsewhere throughout the Basin, a good number of smaller places ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... but temporary, and was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife. Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions. ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... was disappointed to think I was to return to Paris, but felt certain that inasmuch as the orders recalling me had been sent before Mr. Bullitt's arrival, there was every possibility of my being returned to Petrograd. He was most optimistic about the future and felt that the Allies must soon take some definite stand regarding Russia, and that the result of the Paris negotiations would almost surely be favorable to the Soviet Government. He said that the present ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... right side up everywhere, without really noticing them much, but I do think that a great deliberate corporate body like The American Board of Commissioners of Foreign Missions ought to be more optimistic about the Church—wait and work for it a little more, expect a ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... of his childhood. It is from these that the striking phrase about the scream of the saws is taken, and that is perhaps the most telling of these infant memories, many of which are slight and naive. It is interesting, however, to find that his earliest impressions of life at home were of an optimistic character. "Skien," he says, "in my young days, was an exceedingly lively and sociable place, quite unlike what it afterwards became. Several highly cultivated and wealthy families lived in the town itself or close by on their estates. ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... Your scheme Is but an optimistic dream, Whose 'shadowy incentives' seem The merest spooks. Better the ancient plans, I deem, Food, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... should they be stigmatised as ills, seeing that "everything is right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... the newspaper out. It was a good-sized rosy sheet, as if flushed by the warmth of its own convictions, which were optimistic. He scanned ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... counsel for moments of perplexity, a stimulant to faithfulness, a cure for the blues, exhilaration, jubilation. Everything of a depressing nature has been scrupulously ruled out. The keynote, persistently followed through all the pages, is optimistic, bright, buoyant. Trumpet calls and bugle notes are furnished in abundance, but no dirges or elegies. Large space, it will be seen, is given to such topics as Heroism, True Greatness, the Care and Presence of God, the blessings ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... you wish to avoid vibrations of a certain kind, the best way is to rise above them in your own mind, and to cultivate the mental states opposite them. The positive always overcomes the negative—and optimistic mental states are always ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... habitually rageful and intractable beasts was no child's play under the best of conditions; but now, when silence and time were such important considerations, it might well have seemed quite hopeless to a less resourceful and optimistic man than the son ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... tempered water of the school tank, groaned and refused to be optimistic. "Bet it isn't a bit ...
— Left End Edwards • Ralph Henry Barbour
... that any of us really believed that we should die, though whether this was because we had all, except poor Quick, survived so much, or from a sneaking faith in Maqueda's optimistic dreams, I cannot say. At any rate we ate our food with appetite, took exercise in an inner yard of the prison, and strove to grow as strong as we could, feeling that soon we might need all our powers. Oliver was the most miserable ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... Officers' Mess did itself as well as any Mess in India—and only took a few hundred rupees of the Government Grant for the purpose) Colonel Dearman would look upon the wine when it was bubbly, see his Corps through its golden haze, and wax so optimistic, so enthusiastic, so rash, as roundly to state that if he had five hundred of the Gungapur Fusiliers, with magazines charged and bayonets fixed, behind a stout entrenchment or in a fortified building, he would stake his life on their facing any unarmed ...
— Driftwood Spars - The Stories of a Man, a Boy, a Woman, and Certain Other People Who - Strangely Met Upon the Sea of Life • Percival Christopher Wren
... tale, but one which carries the most optimistic of messages. The unobtrusive moral of the story is that the way to find consolation for one's own trouble is to consider those of others and ...
— Parsifal - Story and Analysis of Wagner's Great Opera • H. R. Haweis
... genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises—for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed—rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... setting up formal laws for the development of thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... removed to a hospital and under the salutary influence of new environment gradually recovers his normal mental health. Simultaneously with this he begins to nourish the hope that he may escape punishment for his deed. The amnesia for the period during which the crime was committed lends support to his optimistic views concerning the outcome of the case, and his mind becomes, in consequence, wholly taken up with the idea of being acquitted of the murder charge. He remembers nothing of the deed, and therefore must have been absolutely unaware of what he was doing at ...
— Studies in Forensic Psychiatry • Bernard Glueck
... Christopher, along with offering optimistic and repeated assertions that the diamonds would surely be found, was gleaning a surprising amount of information as he flitted about the store. He learned not only of clocks but interesting bits concerning the value and cutting of gems, the repairing of jewelry; the patterns of silverware, ...
— Christopher and the Clockmakers • Sara Ware Bassett
... the epileptic (with whom the doctor was acquainted): thus had run the medical reasoning, after a discreet but thorough cross-examination of her; and it had seemed so plausible and so convincing that the doctor's pride in it was plain on his optimistic face as he gave the command: "Absolute repose." But to Hilda the reasoning and the resultant phrase, 'nervous breakdown,' had meant nothing at all. Words! Empty words! She knew, profoundly and fatally, the evil principle which had ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... reception of new manifestations of its eruptions; forever in his mind, like a live thing gnawing there. Other people seemed to suffer the war in spasms, isolated amidst the round of their customary routines, of dejection or of optimistic reassurance. The splendid sentiment of "Business as usual" was in many valiant mouths. The land, in so far as provisions and prices were concerned, continued to flow in milk and honey as the British ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... and extending their right as we were preparing to turn it. At first Castelnau seemed to be making rapid and substantial progress; he captured Noyon on 21 September, was pushing on by Lassigny to Roye, and optimistic maps in the English press depicted the German right being bent back to St. Quentin and the French outflanking it as far north-east as Le Catelet. These were not intelligent anticipations. Von Kluck had been reinforced, and a ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... in a few years fallen complete heir to Russian hopes, achievements and possessions in Manchuria and Outer Mongolia, and has had opportunities in Siberia thrown into her hands which she could hardly have hoped for in her most optimistic moments. And now Japan has, with the blessing of the great Powers at Paris, become also the heir of German concessions, intrigues and ambitions, with added concessions, wrung (or bought) from incompetent and corrupt officials ...
— China, Japan and the U.S.A. - Present-Day Conditions in the Far East and Their Bearing - on the Washington Conference • John Dewey
... so thoroughly that we have almost no knowledge of how the Gauls lived, so far as household effects were concerned. The character which descended from this Gallo-Roman race to the later French nation was optimistic and beauty-loving, with a strength which has carried it through many dark days. It might be said to be responsible for the French sense of proportion and their freedom of judgment which has enabled them to hold their important place in the history of art and decoration. ...
— Furnishing the Home of Good Taste • Lucy Abbot Throop
... relief that the name of James Bansemer was not mentioned. The reports from the bedside of the robber's victim were most optimistic. She was delirious from the effects of the shock, but no serious results were expected. The great headlines on the first page of the paper he was reading set his mind temporarily at rest. There was no suggestion of truth ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... road to Kotzebue, optimistic through and through, We'll hit the trail together, boy, once more, ...
— A Daughter of the Dons - A Story of New Mexico Today • William MacLeod Raine
... that our religion is not solely Christ's work. Every drop of blood of a Christian martyr is a stone in the work. Every suffering man with heroic Christian hopes, and every dying human being with optimistic Christian belief is a collaborator of Christ, or is a founder of our Church. The Church is not at all solely Christ's work, she is the collective work of many and many millions who, in the name of Christ, ...
— The Religious Spirit of the Slavs (1916) - Sermons On Subjects Suggested By The War, Third Series • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... seven million dollars of his money and an artificial stringency had been created in Wall Street by this exodus of most of its available cash. But Vanderbilt weathered the storm and, as his generally optimistic attitude inspired confidence, the sky ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... Monocacy will not serve the town for more than another seven or eight years even if the flow needed to maintain adequate water quality is left out of account, and the summers of 1965 and 1966 made even those figures seem slightly optimistic. Both city and State have declared themselves in favor of an upstream major reservoir at Sixes Bridge, also a 1963 proposal. And elsewhere throughout the Basin, a good number of smaller ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... long remain so full and entire as it was now in the sphere of religious belief, but the traces of it never disappeared from his notions on morals and art. Shaftesbury's cheerfulness and geniality in philosophising were thoroughly sympathetic to Diderot. The optimistic harmony which the English philosopher, coming after Leibnitz, assumed as the starting-point of his ethical and religious ideas, was not only highly congenial to Diderot's sanguine temperament; it was a most attractive way of escape from the disorderly and confused theological wilderness ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... discussion concerning religion, is the most important in this age, in which real belief in any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature, and the supposed course of Providence, at least as full of contradictions, and perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of Christianity, if only it ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... Santa Ysobel and the Palace Hotel had failed to locate him. When I believed I had Skeels firmly clasped in the jaws of the Ensenada trap, I had sent a complete report of my doings up to that time, and the optimistic outlook then, to Barbara with instructions for her to get it to Worth. She would know where ...
— The Million-Dollar Suitcase • Alice MacGowan
... recollection of his dinner engagement at the Pennington home warned him to proceed cautiously; for while harbouring no apprehensions as to the outcome of a possible clash with Rondeau, Bryce was not so optimistic as to believe he would escape unscathed from an encounter. Experience had impressed upon him the fact that in a rough-and-tumble battle nobody is quite so thoroughly at home as a lumberjack; once in a clinch with such a man, even a champion gladiator of the prize ring may well feel apprehensive ...
— The Valley of the Giants • Peter B. Kyne
... support to the lingering belief that if syphilis is done away with, licentiousness will overrun the world. Long before syphilis appeared in Europe there was sexual immorality. In the five centuries in which it has had free play over the civilized world, the most optimistic cannot successfully maintain that it has materially bettered conditions or acted as a check on loose morals, though its relation to sexual intercourse has been known. As a morals policeman, syphilis can be obliterated ...
— The Third Great Plague - A Discussion of Syphilis for Everyday People • John H. Stokes
... those who have made a study of the phenomena of life as they exhibited by the higher forms of the animal world, [196] the optimistic dogma, that this is the best of all possible worlds, will seem little better than a libel upon possibility. It is really only another instance to be added to the many extant, of the audacity of a priori speculators who, having created ...
— Evolution and Ethics and Other Essays • Thomas H. Huxley
... keenest attention to his daily duties. In his office he is immersed in affairs which require the exercise of vigilant common-sense, and knowledge of life and literature. At his home he is a serene and optimistic philosopher, contemplating the forces that make for our civilization, and musing over the deep problems of man's occupation of this earth. In 1893 appeared anonymously a volume entitled 'God in His World,' ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... to understand, is consecrated to the unrealities so precious to us. We come here and for a little while allow our dreams to peer timorously at life. In the streets west of here we are what we are—browbeaten, weary-eyed, terribly optimistic units of the boobilariat. Our secret characterizations we hide desperately from the frowns of windows and the squeal ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... reply to this optimistic prophecy was a noncommittal grunt, accompanied by a slight outthrust and uplift of the chin, a pursing of the lips and the ghost of a sardonic little smile. Only an Irishman can get the right tempo to that grunt—and the tempo is everything. In the case of Terence Reardon ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... Harold became suddenly optimistic. "Never you mind, Jack. It won't be long till I am. I'm going to write to her to-day. You get a pencil and paper ...
— The Eagle's Heart • Hamlin Garland
... shortly, or rather, he is to be carted abroad by some optimistic friends whose hopes he does not share—to a celebrated repair shop for damaged pots. Whether he shall return, patched and mended into temporary semblance of a useful Vessel; whether he shall continue to be merely the same old Luckless Pot, or whether ...
— In the Bishop's Carriage • Miriam Michelson
... effort might well have been doubted by our Imperial authorities and our Allies, and while it was certainly regarded as negligible by our enemies, the result in achievement has exceeded, in a mighty degree, the most optimistic hopes even of those who knew or thought they knew ...
— Over the Top With the Third Australian Division • G. P. Cuttriss
... pained that he did not receive an answer at once, although he realised what a blow it would be to her. He understood that, to begin with, it would destroy all her dreams, as it had already destroyed. But he relied on her optimistic nature, which he had never known surpassed, and on the depth of her purpose in all that she undertook. He knew that she drew strength and resolution from all that was deepest in ...
— Absalom's Hair • Bjornstjerne Bjornson
... able to inhale a pure and invigorating breeze that blew from the north, and he felt better. The pain in his head was dying down also, and his courage, according to its habit, rose fast. In a character that nature had compounded of optimistic materials hope was always a ...
— The Sun Of Quebec - A Story of a Great Crisis • Joseph A. Altsheler
... brothers Daudet had taken up their abode. That publisher was Jules Tardieu, himself an author of some merit (under the transparent pseudonym of J. T. de St. Germain): a mild, quiet humorist of the optimistic school, a Topffer on a small scale and with ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern — Volume 11 • Various
... said Sir Percy Blakeney in that optimistic, light-hearted yet supremely authoritative tone of which he held the secret, "you and Rosette remain here and wait for the gendarmes. When they come, say nothing; behave with absolute meekness, and let them ...
— The League of the Scarlet Pimpernel • Baroness Orczy
... act was to send to New York for Miss Strauss, who joined him at once, and they were married. These were the forebears of Charles Frohman—the exuberant, optimistic, pleasure-loving father; the serene, gentle-eyed, and spacious-hearted woman who was to have such a strong influence in the shaping ...
— Charles Frohman: Manager and Man • Isaac Frederick Marcosson and Daniel Frohman
... and which prevail to keep all but the least serious within bounds. German life as a whole is so disciplined, so fitted together, so impossible to break into except through the recognized channels, that few men have the optimistic elasticity of mind and spirits, the demonic confidence in themselves, ...
— Germany and the Germans - From an American Point of View (1913) • Price Collier
... I don't think that any of us really believed that we should die, though whether this was because we had all, except poor Quick, survived so much, or from a sneaking faith in Maqueda's optimistic dreams, I cannot say. At any rate we ate our food with appetite, took exercise in an inner yard of the prison, and strove to grow as strong as we could, feeling that soon we might need all our powers. Oliver was the most miserable among us, not for his own sake, but because, poor ...
— Queen Sheba's Ring • H. Rider Haggard
... awake. Finally he dropped into a sleep so heavy that it was nearer to a torpor, and it was the sunlight that awoke him; sunlight that was warm in the room and proved how late the morning was. He swore in his astonishment and got up hastily, a great deal more optimistic than when he had lain down, and hurried out to feed the stock before he boiled coffee ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... chee" that sounds as though it had been struck on a triangle. Then a silence of exactly nine seconds and repeat. As regularly as clock-work this performance goes on. Time him as often as you will, you can never convict him of a second's variation. And he is so optimistic and willing, and his notes are so golden ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... was bright and gay from the very beginning, even before the first glass of champagne. It began with an optimistic view of the war, then, dropping the grave subject, they talked of people, theatres, books, and general gossip. In all these things Madame Frabelle took the lead. Indeed, she had begun at once laying down the law in a musical voice but with a determined manner that gave those ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... lumberman's judgment of economic influences leads him to be optimistic or otherwise as to the profit of forestry in general, he is most interested in the particular forest with which he has to deal. He can neither accept nor dismiss the proposition intelligently, much less put his ideas into actual ...
— Practical Forestry in the Pacific Northwest • Edward Tyson Allen
... or divine, will at once stop the body-wide stimulations and inhibitions which cause lesions which are as truly physical as is a fracture. The striking benefits of good luck, success, and happiness; of a change of scene; of hunting and fishing; of optimistic and helpful friends, are at once explained by this hypothesis. One can also understand the difference between the broken body and spirits of an animal in captivity and its buoyant return to its ...
— The Origin and Nature of Emotions • George W. Crile
... boys' hearts and minds to emphasise itself. One saw masters who seemed to meddle too much—that sometimes produced an atmosphere of guarded hostility—and one saw masters who seemed to be foolishly optimistic about it all; but as a rule one found in one's colleagues a deep and serious preoccupation with manly ideals of boy-life; and in these stories I tried my best to touch into life the poetical and beautiful side of virtue, to show ...
— Paul the Minstrel and Other Stories - Reprinted from The Hill of Trouble and The Isles of Sunset • Arthur Christopher Benson
... is said, the immigrant problem is not insoluble. There is much in the situation to make one optimistic. Thus far the native stock has been able to survive and to give its best to the newcomer. The immigrant himself has no desire to destroy American institutions. He comes longing to share in their benefits. America is to him an Eldorado, a promised land flowing with milk ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... great deal of sympathy with Jingoism. And there seemed something so touching about this unbroken and innocent bragging under the brutal menace of Nature that it made, if I may so put it, two tunes in my mind. It is so obvious and so jolly to be optimistic about England, especially when you are an optimist—and an Englishman. But through all that glorious brass came the voice of the invasion, the undertone of that awful sea. I did a foolish thing. As I could not express my meaning in an article, I tried to express it in a poem—a bad one. You can ...
— Tremendous Trifles • G. K. Chesterton
... somewhat obvious paraphrase of a Scripture scene—the slaughter of the prophets of Baal by Elijah. The preacher described the ugly carnage with much gusto. He then invited his hearers to stamp out evil with similar vigour, and ended with drawing a highly optimistic picture of the world, representing evil and sin as a kind of skulking and lingering contagion, which God was doing His best to get rid of, and which was indeed only kept alive by the foolish perversity of a few abandoned ...
— Beside Still Waters • Arthur Christopher Benson
... sich law," said Dick Jones, in his optimistic tone, "an' so we needn't worry 'bout it. But if you two gen'rals should happen along through the mountains uv western No'th Calliny after the war I'd like fur you to come to my cabin, an' see Mary an' the baby an' me. Our cove ...
— The Shades of the Wilderness • Joseph A. Altsheler
... cheese, Wullie, but ye maun send her a cheerier-like caird next time. I'll stand ye an optimistic specimen afore ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... not echo Susan's optimistic prophecies. But Mrs. McGuire's own sky just now was overcast, which perhaps had something to do with it. Mrs. McGuire had troubles ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... better humor with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibili- ties of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smil- ing province; a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace him- self even, to go in search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... who made so much of the senoritas before marrying their daughters, and dropped them when that was done. But this neglectful conduct neither damped the kindness of the good ladies nor quelled their optimistic spirit. They kept up an incessant stream of new-comers to their house, and whilst forgetting the ingratitude of the old ones, they set their minds on the worthiness that they attributed to the new. Besides, they harboured no rancour or ...
— The Grandee • Armando Palacio Valds
... Ideals, or a Conscience. The world in general regards Will as mere blind force, applicable to good or bad indifferently. But the more truly and fully it is developed, or as Orson is raised to Valentine, the more moral and optimistic does it become. Will in its perfection is Genius, spontaneous originality, that is Voluntary; not merely a power to lift a weight, or push a load, or force others to yield, but the Thought itself which suggests the deed and finds a reason for it. Now the merely unscrupulous use of Opportunity ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... returned, "then we must stand together." And with that she set her mind at ease once more, her mood that morning being very optimistic. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... that "two thirds of the population possess less than one third of the income, and that 3.5 per cent of the upper incomes receive more than 66 per cent at the lower end." From a table prepared by Sir Robert Giffen, a notoriously optimistic statistician, always the exponent of an ultra-roseate view of social conditions, Professor Mayo-Smith concludes that in England, "about ten per cent of the people receive nearly one half of the total income."[111] These figures are rather out of date, it is true, but they err in understating ...
— Socialism - A Summary and Interpretation of Socialist Principles • John Spargo
... "Without being unduly optimistic," he writes, "it is impossible not to be struck by two great changes for the better in [the military situation] since the time when I first took up my residence in the Transvaal—just eight months ago. These are the now almost absolute safety and uninterrupted working of the ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... read them all, and he knew now what it was to wake up famous, but he could not taste it. Now that it had come it meant nothing, and that it was so complete a triumph only made it the harder. In his most optimistic dreams he had never imagined success so satisfying as the reality had proved to be; but in his dreams Helen had always held the chief part, and without her, success ...
— The Exiles and Other Stories • Richard Harding Davis
... I think my optimistic nature, my ability to shed trouble and to laugh through life, making "all my ducks swans," as friends say I do, must have been inherited from this delightful old masquerading grandfather whose name I am proud to bear.[3] A sunny disposition is worth ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... shall be a riot. I know just the sort of stuff that's needed—simple, manly, optimistic stuff straight from the shoulder. This shoulder," said Gussie, tapping. "Why I was so nervous this morning I can't imagine. For anything simpler than distributing a few footling books to a bunch of grimy-faced kids I can't imagine. Still, for some reason I can't ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... apartment. The rushing violin passages, and every call of Aphrodite, intoxicated his soul and raised his spirits till he knew with the certainty of a fully-aroused instinct that Camilla Payne must be his. He became optimistic on ...
— Hugo - A Fantasia on Modern Themes • Arnold Bennett
... us Socialism comes speculatively as a noble and optimistic theory of what may [be] the crown of progress, to Peter and James and John it came practically as a crisis of their own Daily life, a stirring question ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... of the German newspapers on President Wilson's note of June 9 was reported by THE TIMES staff correspondent in Berlin on June 12 as being "surprisingly restrained and optimistic." Captain L. Persius, the naval critic of the Berliner Tageblatt, which is close to Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, writing under the caption, "On the Way to ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... goodness of civilised humanity, it is still beyond all doubt that Christianity has broken down, and that this breakdown has been brought home to everyone by the terrible catastrophe which has befallen the world. Can the most optimistic apologist contend that this is a satisfactory, outcome from a religion which has had the unopposed run of Europe for so many centuries? Which has come out of it worst, the Lutheran Prussian, the Catholic ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... age reveals itself in every field where mood finds utterance. Every book that makes a sensation does it by virtue of the phase of despair it presents. Every drama that creates a furore does it by uncovering some new tragic element in life. Anything optimistic falls flat. The literary men of Europe are recklessly underbidding each other in the attempt to show that life is sadder, or meaner, or baser, or emptier than had been supposed. The cynic and the pessimist share public attention. Not that European writers are ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... the front doorbell rang. Marie, the maid, went to open the door. Genevieve adjusted the down-sweeping, golden-brown tress over her right eye, brushed an invisible speck from the piano, straightened a rose in a vase, and after these traditionally bridal preparations, waited with a bride's optimistic smile the advent of a caller. But it was Marie who appeared at the door, with a stricken face ...
— The Sturdy Oak - A Composite Novel of American Politics by Fourteen American Authors • Samuel Merwin, et al.
... listened to a Unitarian before or since. He continued an arduous work for some fifteen years, but it wore him out before his time. He was an erudite scholar and a prolific writer. Discarding the claims of Christianity to be the only 'divine revelation,' he based his clear and always optimistic theism on the broad facts of human experience. Ardently interested in social and political questions, he poured satire without stint on the religious defenders of slavery, and himself dared all risks along with the foremost abolitionists. Such a man could not but count ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... growing dissatisfaction with the ruling party, led to a crisis of confidence in President ZEDILLO'S ability to lead, and spurred increased tensions within the ruling party. While the ZEDILLO administration is optimistic that 1996 will bring some recovery - the government is forecasting 3% growth and 21% inflation - Mexico will face several key vulnerabilities, including the financial health of the banking sector, shaky investor confidence that could be easily jarred by more ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... hand. He put them on by the kitchen fire. There was water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold enough to hurt his face. Still his excitement kept him keyed to a pitch of singular and optimistic hilarity. Through the kitchen window came the pale glimmer of snow. He hoped Hughie wouldn't hear him harnessing Nellie, and shoot at the barn. The possibility sent him to the kitchen stairway. It wound upward in an old-fashioned twist to the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... methods less and less, chiefly because the customer recognizes the purpose of the attempt, and either refuses to accept the "hospitality'' or is on his guard to resist the effect. A pleasing personality, however, inspires confidence, tends to put the customer in a good humor and optimistic mood, and ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... Municipal. That page of my experiences is the one I care least to recall, and would most gladly forget. I am not going to specify, or give names of either localities or persons; but, knowing what I know, it is useless to approach me on this topic with the usual good-natured and optimistic, if somewhat unctuous and conventional, commonplaces on general uprightness and the tendency to improved conditions and a higher standard. I know better! I have seen legislators bought like bullocks—they selling themselves. I have watched them cover their tracks with a cunning more than vulpine. ...
— 'Tis Sixty Years Since • Charles Francis Adams
... seeing that the thermometer registered only some five and twenty degrees of frost. And the sun shone brightly. There was no wind. It was an air rich in kindling, stimulating properties; an air that made life, movement, and activity desirable for all, and optimistic determination easy and natural ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... met. Always the child of impulse, and careless of appearance and opinion, she felt her thoughts, none too cheerful or optimistic that morning during her long walk down the avenue, drawn by the expression upon the legless man's face to a sudden focus of triumph and solution. She struck the palm of one small workman-like hand with the back of the other, and ...
— The Penalty • Gouverneur Morris
... appoint you first lieutenant. I guess that nurse is all right, though she doesn't seem to be unduly optimistic." ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... had never attempted to give her any of her confidence. Everything at home, in short, was difficult and confused. Nobody was happy, nobody was natural. Even her own private history, if she looked into it too closely, did not show her any very optimistic colours. She had not seen Johnny St. Leath now for a fortnight, nor heard from him, and those precious words under the Arden Gate one evening were beginning already to appear a dim unsubstantial dream. However, if there was one quality ...
— The Cathedral • Hugh Walpole
... was satisfied. On the whole he considered it perhaps as well they were not married. There was no telling what might happen to him and she would be in a better position if he succumbed to the chances of war. Not that he had any fears on that score; he looked forward to the coming struggle in a very optimistic mood. ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... our appreciation of America will depend on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the great social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If we think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, America will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we believe that man's sympathies for others ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... of the writer, absolute freedom from the restraint that an almost unlimited deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us. Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us. What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. This is what I hope to ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... Philistines, and an inordinate elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand. They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view, the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the fear that we are losing ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... the situation, and believe that we shall witness "blood to the horses' bridles." No one can deny that things are desperately bad, and that something must be done soon to relieve the strain or the very worst may be apprehended; yet the author prefers to see things through optimistic eyes, and believes that God will raise up a Moses, (or Doctor Jones, if you please,) who will lead us to a higher and better state than this world has yet ever known. The old adage 'It is always darkest just ...
— Doctor Jones' Picnic • S. E. Chapman
... long delay Simmy's cheery voice came singing—or rather it was barking—into her ear. This had been the greatest day in the life of Simeon Dodge. From early morn he had gone about in a state of optimistic unrest. He was more excited than he had ever been in his life before,—and yet he was beatifically serene. His brow was unclouded, his eyes sparkled and his voice rang with all the confidence of extreme felicity. There was no question in Simmy's mind as to the outcome. Braden would pull the old ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... for work at the Red Lion. There he met that genial comrade, Joe Hollends, who had been reformed, and who had backslid twice since Jack had foregathered with him before. It is but fair to Joe to admit that he had never been optimistic about his own reclamation, but, being an obliging man, even when he was sober, he was willing to give the Social League every chance. Jack was deeply grieved at the death of his son, although he had said no word to his wife that would show it. It therefore took more liquor than usual to bring ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, April 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... shrewdly: 'I wonder if it isn't a very unfortunate thing for you to have met him.' I showed him radiantly how it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. 'Yes, yes,' said he; 'but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be tempted to use it, instead ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... way along. It was fight, fight, fight, and no let-up, from the first thing in the morning till nightfall. His private office saw throngs every day. All men came to see him, or were ordered to come. Now it was an optimistic opinion on the panic, a funny story, a serious business talk, or a straight take-it-or-leave-it blow from the shoulder. And there was nobody to relieve him. It was a case of drive, drive, drive, and he alone could do the driving. And ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... moderate estimators here put it down as three, with one transport ramming and sinking one U-boat. Two honest lads of one of our own forward gun crews say that our ship bumped over another. They felt the bump. Perhaps they did, but bluejackets at twenty years of age are apt to be optimistic, as witness: ...
— The U-boat hunters • James B. Connolly
... clear that Congress could not and would not set the seal of national authority on any such settlement as this. Granted, and freely, that no millennium was to be expected, that a long and painful adjustment was necessary,—yet it was out of the question that any political theory or any optimistic hopes should induce acquiescence in the legal establishment of semi-slavery throughout the South. It was not Stevens's rancor, nor Sumner's unpracticability, but the serious conviction of the North, ...
— The Negro and the Nation - A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement • George S. Merriam
... to Irving, though treating Columbus with less fulness of detail, came the polished historian Prescott, whose "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" was published in 1837. This ardent and laborious scholar was, like Irving, constitutionally inclined to the optimistic view of his leading characters. To magnify the virtues and to minimize the faults of their heroes has always been the besetting sin of biographers. The pomp and picturesque circumstance of the Spanish court, the splendid administrative abilities of Ferdinand, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... feel now that something will happen," declared the optimistic Betty. "If four girls and four boys, besides the best man in New England, to wit, my daddy, cannot find them, then, indeed, they ...
— The Motor Girls Through New England - or, Held by the Gypsies • Margaret Penrose
... constantly improving. Before the war we were told that the age had improved to such an extent that a great war would no longer be possible. Everybody was lauding our great civilization to the skies. A few weeks after everything was knocked sky-high, and what is left of all these optimistic ramblings? No, this age does not improve, and everything which the Word of God has to say about it has been solemnly verified and confirmed by the roar of cannons and by the slaughter of millions. Our great inventions and discoveries ...
— Studies in Prophecy • Arno C. Gaebelein
... life's work. I know—and it will bear repeating—no other profession that holds so much of bigness and of fullness of life generally. Engineers themselves reflect it. Usually robust, always active, generally optimistic, engineers as a group swing through life—and have swung through life from the beginnings of the profession—without thought of publicity, for instance, or need or desire for it. Their work alone engrossed their minds. It was enough—it is enough—and more. And ...
— Opportunities in Engineering • Charles M. Horton
... as that of one of the founders, although as the Mazzini rather than as the Cavour of the Norse Risorgimento. And whatever may be the future of the land that claims him for her own, his spirit will walk abroad long after he has ceased to live among men. His large, genial, optimistic personality is of the sort that cannot fail to stamp itself upon other generations than the one that actually counts him ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... moonlight had grown duller in the areaway and the youth had faded out of Olive's face, but as a glorious and triumphant climb over obstacles which he had determinedly surmounted by unconquerable will-power. The optimistic self-delusion that had kept him from misery was seen now in the golden garments of stern resolution. Half a dozen times he had taken steps to leave the Moonlight Quill and soar upward, but through sheer faintheartedness he had stayed ...
— Tales of the Jazz Age • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... hot days were fraught with much new interest. Life was new and golden, viewed from this fresh viewpoint. Helen had come hitherward from her city haunts with trepidation; even Longstreet, serenely optimistic regarding the ultimate crown of success to his labour, was genuinely delighted. The days passed ...
— The Desert Valley • Jackson Gregory
... geniality which would have been suitably consequent upon a good dinner with plenty of wine. But his only beverage had been coffee, and in his clear bright eye there was no trace of any exhilaration, except that caused by the action of a hearty meal upon a good digestion and an optimistic disposition. ...
— The Associate Hermits • Frank R. Stockton
... the line. It's worth a ton Of optimistic commonplaces. It's tonic, it refreshes one, It cheers, it stimulates, it braces. It summarizes things so well; It has the philosophic ring. Has Kant or Hegel more to tell? "There's ...
— A line-o'-verse or two • Bert Leston Taylor
... seemed ready to crack a joke with anyone, and possibly there was no more optimistic man in the whole of Britain. To the boys and girls of Wood Green he was a popular hero. He was usually clad in a "cowboy" hat, red flannel shirt, and buckskin breeches, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. On certain occasions he would give a "Wild West" exhibition at the Alexandra ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... lover is ever optimistic, and he could conceive of no errand that could have brought this man to his cottage unless he was charged with the delivery of a note from Maud. He spared a moment from his happiness to congratulate himself on having picked such an admirable go-between. ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... at ease and feeling more optimistic every minute. Three men still believed in him, which was much. Also, the crowd could not flurry him as it did some of the others who were not accustomed to so great an audience; rather, it acted as a tonic and brought back the poise, the easy self-confidence ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... not very optimistic about the possibility of that. I find it very, very difficult to get roots to develop from Hicoria. You can get the callus almost every time, but it is very difficult to secure the development ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Second Annual Meeting - Ithaca, New York, December 14 and 15, 1911 • Northern Nut Growers Association
... manlier to avoid such thoughts, in which case your memory of these torturing experiences will gradually fade away. Live in the future and forget the past. The man or woman who lives in the future, and for the future, will invariably be optimistic and cheerful. It is a ...
— Vitality Supreme • Bernarr Macfadden
... maintaining Greek Orthodox priests in districts where the population was Protestant or Roman Catholic. Consequently, of the 35,865 parishes which Russia contains, only 18,936, or a little more than one-half, were enabled to benefit by the grant. In an optimistic, semi-official statement published as late as 1896 it is admitted that "the means for the support of the parish clergy must even now be considered insufficient and wanting in stability, making the priests dependent ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... to blackmail a woman than a man, and Price Ruyler could not have looked an easy mark to the most optimistic of social brigands. ...
— The Avalanche • Gertrude Franklin Horn Atherton
... but he holds a responsible post and has opportunities of meeting important stock-brokers and business men," Osborn went on, turning to his wife. "He is, of course, optimistic and has been rash, but after all he may have found out something useful. He declares the venture ...
— The Buccaneer Farmer - Published In England Under The Title "Askew's Victory" • Harold Bindloss
... you to be glad, Madame? If you are glad it is your own affair. Have I troubled you since we last met? I need the sympathy of nobody. I am assured of a large audience. My impresario is excessively optimistic. And if this is so, I owe it to none but myself. You speak of insults. Permit me to say that I regard your patronage as an insult. I have done nothing, I imagine, to deserve it. I crack my head to divine what I have done to deserve it. You hear some silly ...
— The Lion's Share • E. Arnold Bennett
... conflicting interests are involved. But it is not impossible. If persons interested in this question be really desirous of seeing it settled and are willing to listen to reasonable proposals, I believe that a way may be found for its solution. There is good reason for my optimistic opinion. Even the Labor Unions, unless I am mistaken, would welcome an amicable settlement of this complicated question. In 1902, while at Washington, I was agreeably surprised to receive a deputation of the leaders of the Central Labor Union ...
— America Through the Spectacles of an Oriental Diplomat • Wu Tingfang
... not very communicative during that dainty little tea a trois, but she listened smilingly to Jack's optimistic views ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... been given away before he had discovered that Alexander was a telepath. Perhaps Alexander was merely leading him on. There were too many intangibles, and there was no way of predicting how it would turn out. But he felt mildly optimistic. ...
— The Lani People • J. F. Bone
... so that communication between the Eastern and Western continents was uninterrupted. It was a proud day for America. Even while the Martians had been upon the earth, carrying everything before them, demonstrating to the confusion of the most optimistic that there was no possibility of standing against them, a feeling—a confidence had manifested itself in France, to a minor extent in England, and particularly in Russia, that the Americans might discover means to meet and master ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putnam Serviss
... before affairs emerged from the chaotic state into which the war had plunged them. The average planter had little or no faith in free negro labor, yet all who were now able were willing to give it a trial. The more optimistic land-owners believed that the free negro could in time be made an efficient laborer, in which case they were willing to admit that the change might prove beneficial to both races. At first, however, no one knew just how to work the free negro; innumerable ...
— History and Comprehensive Description of Loudoun County, Virginia • James W. Head
... genuinely and not in the least evilly amused at the contrast between the disreputable squalor of the scene and the lofty claim advanced. The three emotions are not at all inconsistent. The pessimistic moralist might say that it was all very shocking, the optimistic moralist might say that it was hopeful, the unreflective humourist might simply be transported by the absurdity; yet not to be amused at such a scene would appear to me to be both dull and priggish. It seems to me to be a false solemnity to be shocked ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... of nineteenth-century England, something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... "I don't want to be too optimistic, but there's a verse in Longfellow which I think you might like." He paused again. "It has something to do with the Mills ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... wrangled and disputed, great forces were at work among the Russian people. By 1910 the terrible pall of depression and despair which had settled upon the nation as a result of the failure of the First Revolution began to break. There was a new generation of college students, youthful and optimistic spirits who were undeterred by the failure of 1905-06, confident that they were wiser and certain to succeed. Also there had been an enormous growth of working-class organizations, large numbers of unions and co-operative societies having been formed in spite of the efforts of the government. ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... discontent that poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps—with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son—with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most optimistic ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of his numerous schemes, caused an elation that amounted to hilarity. On the other hand, the deadly blight of non-fulfilment, that annually attacked his most cherished hopes for the future development of his native town, failed in any wise to depress him, or check the prodigal casting of his optimistic daily bread on the placid social waters where, as the years multiplied, his enthusiasms ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... she had learned all. Of course, he told himself, he must not take any notice of her wild suggestion that he and Cleo must part and that their marriage didn't count; nor did he permit himself to be allured by her optimistic pre-perception of the future. Noble heart that she was, she had been striving to lessen his pain. He felt he understood what had prompted her every word. And the readiness with which she had bowed her head in acceptance of ...
— Cleo The Magnificent - The Muse of the Real • Louis Zangwill
... with his hands clenched at his sides, and Mr. Harbison with his arms folded and very erect. Dal took Jim by the elbow and led him downstairs, muttering, and the situation was saved for the time. But Dal was not optimistic. ...
— When a Man Marries • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... damnably dry land too—as in Africa. And there was a real old English sincerity in the vulgar chorus that "Britons never shall be slaves." We had no equality and hardly any justice; but freedom we were really fond of. And I think just now it is worth while to draw attention to the old optimistic prophecy that "Britons never shall ...
— A Miscellany of Men • G. K. Chesterton
... armed forces of the Entente or of such forces as are maintained by the governments of the Entente or enjoy their financial, military, technical or other support." There follows a statement that the extent of the concessions will depend on the military position. Chicherin proceeds to give a rather optimistic account of the external and internal situation. Finally he touches on the question of propaganda. "The Russian Soviet Government, while pointing out that it cannot limit the freedom of the revolutionary press, declares its readiness, in case of necessity to include in the ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... now in an area in which even the optimistic Ordnance Survey (who in the chatty little notes they append to their maps, characterised the local water supply as "abundant though varying in quality") considered wheeled transport as impracticable. In consequence our nodding acquaintanceship with camels ripened quickly ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... don't know. I hope she's still alive, but I'm not unduly optimistic. It seems that about a year ago, Dr. Hadron transposed to the Second Level, to study alleged proof of reincarnation which the Akor-Neb people were reported to possess. She went to Gindrabar, on Venus, and transposed to the Second Paratime Level, to ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... observation was taken, sometimes a certain strata of wind enabling them to get close enough to the earth to use their eyes, while again they had to use the telescopes. They covered a wide section but as day after day passed, and they were no nearer their goal, even Tom optimistic as he usually was, began to have a tired ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... both on the mainland and on the islands, were anxious that we should go; they doubted whether Western Europe had any knowledge of the Italian methods of administration. And if the immediate result of our journey would be to call down upon themselves—as indeed it did—a savage wind, they were optimistic enough to feel that it would eventually produce a whirlwind for their oppressors.] ... The S.S. Porer, 130 tons, was flying at the stern the temporary flag of white, blue, white in horizontal stripes which had ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... Montana as a has-been for big game, and began to seek better hunting-grounds elsewhere. British Columbia, Alberta and Alaska have done much for the game of Montana by drawing sportsmen away from it. Mr. Henry Avare, the State Game Warden, is optimistic regarding even the big game, and believes that it is holding its own. This is partially true of white-tailed deer, or it was up to the time of great slaughter. It is said that in 1911, 11,000 deer were killed in Montana, all in the western part ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... that the name of James Bansemer was not mentioned. The reports from the bedside of the robber's victim were most optimistic. She was delirious from the effects of the shock, but no serious results were expected. The great headlines on the first page of the paper he was reading set his mind temporarily at rest. There was no suggestion ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... days passed it wasn't all right. Kitchener began to call for his army. Belgium was invaded. We began to hear about atrocities. There were rumours of defeat, which ceased to be rumours, and of grey hordes pressing towards Paris. It began to dawn on the most optimistic of us that the little British Army—the Old Contemptibles—hadn't gone to France on ...
— The Glory of the Trenches • Coningsby Dawson
... attributing success, in the future at least, to what could really inspire veneration; and such a master in equivocation could have no difficulty in convincing himself that the good must conquer in the end if whatever conquers in the end is the good. Among the pragmatists the worship of power is also optimistic, but it is not to logic that power is attributed. Science, they say, is good as a help to industry, and philosophy is good for correcting whatever in science might disturb religious faith, which in turn is helpful in living. What industry or life are ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... In the beech-tree opposite a wren was raising optimistic outcry. The sun had won his way through a black-bellied shred of cloud; upon the terrace below, a dripping Venus and a Perseus were glistening as with white fire. Past these, drenched gardens, the natural wildness of which was judiciously restrained with walks, ponds, grottoes, statuary and ...
— The Certain Hour • James Branch Cabell
... slighted; it seemed clear to the juvenile mind, therefore, that neither she nor her descendants would ever recover from such a blow. But, under all the circumstances, would she be allowed to join in the procession? Even Rebecca, the optimistic, feared not, and the committee confirmed her fears by saying that Abner Simpson's daughter certainly could not take any prominent part in the ceremony, but that they hoped Mrs. Fogg would allow her to ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... rest about the syndicate report now that it had been mailed to London. His thoughts wandered to his own affairs, and he wondered whether he would make money out of the option he had acquired at Ottawa. He was not an optimistic man, ...
— A Woman Intervenes • Robert Barr
... Lubbock, "the sun is generally regarded as an evil, and in cold as a beneficent being." [261] We are willing to accept this, with allowance. There is little question that taking men as a whole they are mainly optimistic in their judgments respecting the gifts of earth and the glories of heaven. Mr. Brinton, in reference to the imagined destructiveness of the water deity, writes: "Another reaction in the mythological laboratory is here disclosed. As the good qualities of water ...
— Moon Lore • Timothy Harley
... and commerce, where, owing to the many and varied improvements, the townsman of the future is expected to unite the physical health and longevity of the Boeotian with the mental superiority of the Athenian. But we may ask whether this somewhat optimistic forecast does not ignore one important question. Has it been sufficiently considered how far the moral and physical health of the modern city depends upon the constant influx of fresh blood from the country, which ...
— The Rural Life Problem of the United States - Notes of an Irish Observer • Horace Curzon Plunkett
... the optimistic view of the man who said that Jefferson Worth could build a railroad for Barba and the South Central District whenever he wished, there was no little disappointment expressed in Worth's town when it became known that the Company town was to ...
— The Winning of Barbara Worth • Harold B Wright
... our bridges when we come to them, Gib. Cheer up, my boy, cheer up. I got a new engineer. He won't last, but he'll last long enough for Mac to forget his grouch an' listen to reason," and with this optimistic remark Captain Scraggs dropped into the engine room to get up enough steam ...
— Captain Scraggs - or, The Green-Pea Pirates • Peter B. Kyne
... plant, and passes almost unnoticed beside the flaunting gaudiness of the dahlia or the showy spikes of the hollyhock, yet it is from that modest, low-growing, grey-green flower that comes the sweetness that perfumes the whole air, for the most optimistic person would hardly expect fragrance from dahlias or hollyhocks. They have their uses; they are showy, decorative and aspiring, but they ...
— Here, There And Everywhere • Lord Frederic Hamilton
... borrowed what Vohrenlorf had said to me when we were with the Bartensteins. He did not often hit the nail exactly on the head, but just now I could give no better summary of all I felt than his soberly optimistic reminder: "Ah, well, even if it should be so, you have ...
— The King's Mirror • Anthony Hope
... Bellville. It has leaked out that our rivals will come over strengthened by a 'ringer,' no less than Yale's star pitcher, Wayne. We saw him shut Princeton out in June, in the last game of the college year, and we are not optimistic in our predictions as to what Salisbury can do with him. This appears a rather unfair procedure for Bellville to resort to. Why couldn't they come over with their regular team? They have won a game, and so have we; both games were close and brilliant; the deciding game has roused ...
— The Redheaded Outfield and Other Baseball Stories • Zane Grey
... found to be frozen over as far as the horizon. When the party got back to their shelter two eggs had burst and saturated Cherry-Garrard's mitts. This optimistic young man found good even in this, for he said that on the way home to Cape Evans his mitts thawed out far more easily than Bowers's did, and attributed the little triumph to the grease in the broken egg! That night ...
— South with Scott • Edward R. G. R. Evans
... it aloud on Christmas Day, and it seemed tremendous. Not in my most wildly optimistic moments did I think Hiordis, the chief female character—a primitive, fighting, free, open-air person—suited to me, but I saw a way of playing her more brilliantly and less weightily than the text suggested, ...
— The Story of My Life - Recollections and Reflections • Ellen Terry
... course beware of being unduly optimistic. The fact that millions of our men are seeing with their own eyes the results which can be achieved by naked force will not be without its effect on their attitude when they return to their homes. If force is so necessary and so successful on the field ...
— The War and Unity - Being Lectures Delivered At The Local Lectures Summer - Meeting Of The University Of Cambridge, 1918 • Various
... taking an optimistic view of Juanita and that which must supervene when she had grown into understanding ...
— The Velvet Glove • Henry Seton Merriman
... had come all this tribulation to the man, though the final disappearance of all he was worth, save some valueless remnants, had been preceded by two or three heavy losses. Optimistic in his ventures, he was not naturally a fool. Ill fortune had come to him without apparent provocation, as it comes to many another man of intelligence, and had followed him persistently and ruthlessly when others less deserving were prospering all about him. It was not astonishing ...
— The Wolf's Long Howl • Stanley Waterloo
... intrigues and treachery of the supreme junta there assembled; and Napoleon was preparing a fresh army to overrun Portugal, under the command of Massena. The Perceval ministry, in which Liverpool had taken Castlereagh's post of secretary for war and the colonies, adopting an optimistic tone at home, practically told Wellington that he must shift for himself; and he braced himself up to do ...
— The Political History of England - Vol XI - From Addington's Administration to the close of William - IV.'s Reign (1801-1837) • George Brodrick
... Loos and its aftermath of minor massacres in the ground we had gained—the new horror of that new salient—had sapped into the confidence of those battalion officers and men who had been assured of German weakness by cheery, optimistic, breezy-minded generals. It was no good some of those old gentlemen saying, "We've got 'em beat!" when from Hooge to the Hohenzollern redoubt our men sat in wet trenches under ceaseless bombardment of heavy guns, and when any small attack they made by the orders of a High Command which believed ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... one met kept telling him that everything was perfectly normal. No intending purchaser of real estate in a boom town was ever treated to more optimistic propaganda. Perfectly normal—when one found only three customers in a large department store! Perfectly normal—when the big steamship offices presented in their windows bare blue seas which had once been charted with the going and coming of German ships! Perfectly normal—when ...
— My Year of the War • Frederick Palmer
... very hard, and it is no wonder that the stragglers back from the mines increased in numbers as time went on. It was a true case of survival of the fittest. Those who remained and became professional miners were the hardiest, most optimistic, and most persistent of the population. The mere physical labor was very severe. Any one not raised as a day laborer who has tried to do a hard day's work in a new garden can understand what pick and shovel digging in the bottoms of gravel and boulder streams can ...
— The Forty-Niners - A Chronicle of the California Trail and El Dorado • Stewart Edward White
... to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises—for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed—rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service in worlds other than ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... able to earn "three square meals a day," like the Australians themselves; and while English butchers suffer (for some one must suffer in all great revolutions), smiling Plenty will walk through our land studying a cookery-book. There are optimistic thinkers, who gravely argue that the serious desires of humanity are the pledges of their own future fulfilment. If that be correct, the Australian myth may be founded on fact. There is no desire more deep-rooted in our ...
— Lost Leaders • Andrew Lang
... white school teachers, referred to above. That there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. Unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. That there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that I agree with the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry in stating that: "I have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... nonessentials. He had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success—that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; but, to get her whole mind as one gives it only in combating ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Spencer can no more deduce the necessity for the eventual appearance of "moving equilibria" of harmonious totalities than Hegel could guarantee the "higher unities" in which all contradictions should be reconciled. In Spencer's hands the theory of evolution acquired a more decidedly optimistic character than in Darwin's; but I shall deal later with the relation of Darwin's hypothesis to the opposition ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... not despair," continued the doctor in an endeavour to be optimistic. "Madame is strong and healthy. She has a very sound constitution, and in such a case as this it is a most important factor in the recovery. You may rely on me to do my utmost. I have great hopes that we may save the right eye of madame, ...
— Swirling Waters • Max Rittenberg
... as approximating to the truth? The answer is simply that our argument from adaptability does not require the assumption in question, but only that we should be able to distinguish higher from lower tendencies, progressive from regressive movements, without holding the optimistic view that on the whole the forward tendency is at present prevailing. It is not because we live in the nineteenth century that we consider our moral perceptions truer than those of the ancient Hebrews, but because we at once comprehend and transcend their ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... softening of her feelings towards him since she had thus set herself up in his defence, Deborah could not fail to perceive under all these surface attractions an expression of unreliability, or, as some would say, of actual cruelty. Ruddy- haired and fair of skin, he should have had an optimistic temperament; but, on the contrary, he was of a gloomy nature, and only infrequently social. No company was better for his being in it. Never had she seen any man sit out the evening with him without effort. Yet the house had prospered. How often had she said to herself, ...
— Dark Hollow • Anna Katharine Green
... are things more real than the shadows on the wall with which they amuse themselves. Not all the writers just named are equally sure that they, rather than the world, are right. The women are thoroughly optimistic. Mr. Woodberry, though he leaves the question, whether the poet's beauty is a delusion, unanswered in the poem where he broaches it, has betrayed his faith in the ideal realms everywhere in his writings. James Thomson, on the contrary, is ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... three yards of butter—let her see you smiling, let her find you gay; be as bright and chipper as a new tin dipper, show you're optimistic, in the good old way! If you mope and mumble this good dame will tumble, and she'll tell her neighbors that your head is sore; no one likes a dealer who's a dismal squealer, so your friends will toddle to some other store. When the luck seems balky, and the trade is rocky, that's the time ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... in his mind's eye he beheld Margaret Elizabeth and Uncle Bob seated beside the hearth. For aught he knew, it might be Augustus McAllister making an evening call, but the Candy Man was just then too determinedly optimistic to ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... Paragot. At last he laid the book aside, and gathering together hat, gloves, and umbrella, the precious appanages of his new estate, he announced his intention of taking the air before dinner. I remained indoors to gossip with Blanquette during its preparation. I had considerable doubts as to her optimistic view of things, and these were confirmed as soon as the outer door closed behind my master, and the salon door ...
— The Beloved Vagabond • William J. Locke
... came creeping out of the dining-room, and, seeing her child's blanched face, was persistently optimistic. Absurd to give up hope because a letter did not come by the first possible post! A hundred things might have happened to cause a delay; and, even if it had been posted in time, the ...
— The Fortunes of the Farrells • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... almost all ages this sort of Realism has actually attempted to assert itself in literature. Idealism, the tendency opposite to Realism, seeks to emphasize the spiritual and other higher elements, often to bring out the spiritual values which lie beneath the surface. It is an optimistic interpretation of life, looking for what is good and permanent beneath all the surface confusion. Romance may be called Idealism in the realm of sentiment. It aims largely to interest and delight, to throw over life a pleasing glamor; it generally deals with love ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... big, very black mole on the extreme tip of his nose, and is the cheeriest, most optimistic soul on the ocean wave, yea! even those out-size waves in ...
— Leonie of the Jungle • Joan Conquest
... the interests of Senator Hanway was proposed, waxed threateningly exuberant. He was for issuing forth to vociferate and slap members upon their backs and jovially arrange committeeships on the giffgaff principle of give us the Speakership and you shall become a Chairman. The optimistic Mr. Harley, whose methods were somewhat coarse and who did most things with an ax, was precisely of that hopeful sort who would advertise an auction of the lion's hide while it was yet upon the beast. Senator Hanway, with instincts safer and more upon ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... the circulation congest. They could not conceive themselves up and around, pursuing their normal life during such a time. However, as they have found by experience that this point of view is not an optimistic dream, they have broken up the confidence-game which their subconscious had been playing on them, and have ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... to be optimistic about the future of the Australian blacks. The race seems doomed to perish. Something can be done to prolong their life, to make it more pleasant; but they will never be a people, never take any share in the development of the continent ...
— Peeps At Many Lands: Australia • Frank Fox
... most cheerful and delightful figures at Chartres is that of the very tall angel holding a sun dial, on the corner of the South tower. A certain optimistic inconsequence is his chief characteristic, as if he really believed that the hours bore more of happiness than of sorrow ...
— Arts and Crafts in the Middle Ages • Julia De Wolf Addison
... It was a good-sized rosy sheet, as if flushed by the warmth of its own convictions, which were optimistic. He scanned ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... takes an unduly optimistic view when she says the Germans mean the war to be decided out here. Nothing would suit us better. Meanwhile, we certainly seem to mean to go to Baghdad, and that will mean at least one other big fight: but so far they show no sign ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... sought the hotel he remembered his friend Hawkins, who was working on the Daily Times. Bill had been his lieutenant overseas. He was a fighting fool and had always been an optimistic chap. In his present frame of mind, optimism was what he needed. Accordingly he called Hawkins up and invited ...
— El Diablo • Brayton Norton
... cold water. We had not lung capacity to satisfy our desire for it. There came with it a dry exhilaration that brought high spirits, an optimistic viewpoint, and a tremendous keen appetite. It seemed that we could never tire. In fact we never did. Sometimes, after a particularly hard day, we felt like resting; but it was always after the day's work was done, ...
— The Mountains • Stewart Edward White
... cultivate optimism and hopefulness. There is nothing like it. The optimistic man can see a bright ...
— Toaster's Handbook - Jokes, Stories, and Quotations • Peggy Edmund & Harold W. Williams, compilers
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