"Optimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... freely, but she drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... steady on his feet, is not too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is undoubtedly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... first time since my leap from the wall I found myself with sufficient leisure to review the situation. It struck me that only a very hardened optimist could describe it as hopeful. I had made my bolt almost instinctively, without stopping to think what chances I had of getting away. That these were meagre in the extreme was now becoming painfully clear to me. Even if I managed to slip out of my present hiding-place into the still larger ...
— A Rogue by Compulsion • Victor Bridges
... Mr. Optimist, on your opinions," quoth I, "but your observation leads me to suppose, that you are both an historian and a traveller: am ...
— Pelham, Complete • Edward Bulwer-Lytton
... such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself—before I met ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... approaches this question of writing English with self-criticism and with a full realization of the difficulties, and of the tentative nature of the methods now in use, but with confidence as to the possibility of ultimate success. In order to be an Optimist in composition you must have some stirrings of democracy in your veins. You must be interested in the need of the average man to shape his writing into a useful tool that will serve his purposes, whether in the ministry or the soap business. This is the utilitarian end of writing English. ...
— College Teaching - Studies in Methods of Teaching in the College • Paul Klapper
... the authority a carnal institution, like a bureaucracy. He rages as he sees them abandoning charters that gave men rights, and accepting charters that only give them prohibitions. It has been the custom for a long time to speak of Mr. Chesterton as an optimist; and there was, indeed, a time when he was so rejoiced by the discovery that the children of men were also the children of God, that he was as aggressively cheerful as Whitman and Browning rolled into one. But he has ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror, goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now and again, to discover that it ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... little I was joined by two young Irish soldiers. I don't know who or what they took me for; certainly not for the Generalissimo. They came along with me and discussed identical adventures from diametrically different standpoints. One, in fact, was an optimist; the other a pessimist. One found fault with the war for not giving him enough hardship and adventure; the other was entirely fed up with adventures and hardships. This seems a trivial incident to jot down amidst issues so tremendous, but life is life, and my chat with these ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... himself in honor of the house party, and had produced a succession of dishes, which in happier days Mr. Peters would have devoured eagerly. To be compelled by considerations of health to pass these by was enough to damp the liveliest optimist. Mr. Peters had suffered terribly. Occasions of feasting and revelry like the present were for him so many battlefields, on ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... most of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice is ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of ...
— United States Presidents' Inaugural Speeches - From Washington to George W. Bush • Various
... to his infirmity, and then perforce, as an excuse for some trouble he put me to, and so slightly worded that I paid no heed. This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which none but the untried will think lightly. And I think it worth noting how this optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles, which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... which the vanished splendour of the mountains seemed to make a mystic answering. He was a romantic—some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to himself; and it had suddenly been borne in upon him, ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... over. There's nothing of the shellfish about her; she's a live woman, as well as a mighty pretty one, and she cares enough about you to keep you awake and in the game. I congratulate you, Kent, and I'm almost as happy as you are. Also I shall play the optimist at our next directors' meeting; I see signs of a boom in the literature factory. Go to it, my son. You have ...
— Kent Knowles: Quahaug • Joseph C. Lincoln
... of what we might term the optimist's philosophy is—If you can mend a situation mend it; if you can't mend it ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... the yellow tuft on his chin. What could they be, then? Not summer boarders. It was only early spring; and, besides, although the little German was an optimist, even he could not imagine any one selecting a Dakota prairie for an outing. Yet ... No, they could not ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... I wanted to raise a discussion on this subject. I really am a dyed-in-the-wool optimist. I am willing to sacrifice some nut trees to laboratory purposes for the benefit of our young men. We want the individuals to profit by the education. This should be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... the world to reform it. His aim was to amuse himself, and if in so doing he entertained or gratified others, so much the better. "Reform away," he was once reported as saying, "reform away, but as for me, the world is good enough for me as it is. I am a thorough optimist. In temperament I'm a little like old Horace—I want to get all the happiness out of the world that's possible." And he got it, not intermittently and in chunks, but day by day and every hour of ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... not answer. She took another look at the rapidly advancing line and felt, not unreasonably, that the straw was a weak one even for the clutch of an optimist. They dug in, weary as they were, making small progress, but with hopeful eyes bent upon the distant arroyo. At least they were going in a different direction from the riders. Hard limped painfully. His face was set in ...
— Across the Mesa • Jarvis Hall
... ladies to which he has been adding for years past Sir Walter Besant is chiefly remarkable as an example of what may be done by a steadfast cheerfulness in style. His creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we have no better sample of a manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of 'the great joyless city' of the East. He has had a double aim—to keep his work recreative and to make it useful. In one respect ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously long. She was at the station before the train arrived. A delay had been signalled. It weighed heavily upon her. Optimist in her projects, and placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason. The gray light, which the three-quarters of an hour filtered through the window-panes of the station, fell ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... really thought it was all right. The fact that he owed a thousand already and that the remaining two would almost certainly be swept into the capacious maw of the Metropolitan Store did not occur to him then. Daniel Dott was a failure as a business man but as an optimist ...
— Cap'n Dan's Daughter • Joseph C. Lincoln
... mystery again—an alarming mystery. Elizabeth had not given her address to anyone: Fandor had been careful not to give it to a soul.... Clearly, this poor girl, even in the heart of this peaceful convent, was not secure from some unknown, outside interference; and Fandor, optimist though he was, could not help shuddering at the thought of these mysterious adversaries, implacable and formidable, who might work harm to this unfortunate girl, whose devoted protector he now was.... Besides ... did he not feel for Jacques Dollon's pretty sister something sweeter and more tender ...
— Messengers of Evil - Being a Further Account of the Lures and Devices of Fantomas • Pierre Souvestre
... being noticed, and, carrying his trusty rifle at the ready, he stealthily disappeared in the brush south of the spring. A young boy, with a new gun and lots of brush to prowl through! Under such circumstances the optimist can imagine anything from rabbits ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... not sufficient motives in the eyes of Bulthaupt and d'Albert for the first fratricide; there must be an infusion of psychology and modern philosophy. Abel is an optimist, an idealist, a contented dreamer, joying in the loveliness of life and nature; Cain, a pessimist, a morose brooder, for whom life contained no beautiful illusions. He gets up from his couch in the night to question the right of God ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... nothing is perfect, and everything has a side that can be criticised. What you have to do is to sum up the whole, take the average benefit which comes from it, and attempt to increase that average. Now I am an optimist. People say the initiative and the referendum, against which I have talked, are like a ratchet wheel. If you extend power to the people and the voters, you will never get it back again. I agree that is a rule that generally works, but with respect to the initiative and the referendum ...
— Ethics in Service • William Howard Taft
... queried Wilbur. "You're an optimist. But that's because you've never seen him ride. I consider it a good day's work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... suffered. It was hard to be the one optimist in the midst of so many pessimists. The nightly performance to an empty house wore on her most distressingly, and no wonder. She, who had never hitherto given a moment's troubled thought to such matters, now sat in her dressing-room listening to the infrequent, hollow clang of the ...
— The Light of the Star - A Novel • Hamlin Garland
... the finest living English novelist, but there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith. Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great man ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... Optimist, in an editorial for the Philadelphia North American, says: "And when, after Pollyanna has gone away, you get her letter saying she is going to take 'eight steps' to-morrow—well, I don't know just what you may do, but I know of one person who buried his face in his hands and ...
— The House in the Water - A Book of Animal Stories • Charles G. D. Roberts
... consciousness some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him?—not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly knows that he will put down ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... be sure the thermometer was down in the neighborhood of thirty degrees one night, but it was there so short a time that it scarcely seems possible that any harm could have been done by it. The horticulturist should be a natural optimist and always anticipate something good ahead, which is one pretty ...
— Trees, Fruits and Flowers of Minnesota, 1916 • Various
... dramatically muggy and threatening, in keeping with her state of mind—the sort of forced weather that issues offstage in roars of thunder the moment the villain begins his plotting. She took a street car, having meant to walk and give herself time to pull together and adopt the fat smile of a professional optimist. ...
— The Gorgeous Girl • Nalbro Bartley
... I knew long since, a white-haired man, Pithy of speech, and merry when he would; A genial optimist, who daily drew From what he saw his quaint moralities. Kindly he held communion, though so old, With me a dreaming boy, and taught me much That books tell not, and I shall ...
— Poetical Works of William Cullen Bryant - Household Edition • William Cullen Bryant
... was following them into the hall. 'Oh, I hate pessimists! What's the latest definition of them? Ah, I know; an optimist is a person who doesn't care what happens as long as it doesn't ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... had already endured were small indeed in comparison to those which awaited us. It was well with the Uitlander optimist who remained in our country while the Republics could give him the comforts he demanded as his right, but who, as soon as things went wrong, and he saw nothing but misery in the future, left for his own country—there to sit in judgment on our peasant-nation. How I long for the gift of being ...
— On Commando • Dietlof Van Warmelo
... only CAN come about the new birth of Art, and I think it WILL come about thus. You may say it is a long process, and so it is; but I can conceive of a longer. I have given you the Socialist or Optimist view of the matter. Now for the ...
— Signs of Change • William Morris
... many leading men of that time, the eccentricities of the man whom the world called unpractical and visionary must be forgotten, so as to get a glimpse of the Alcott who was the intimate friend of Emerson—a genius, a philosopher, an optimist, in spite of failure and in spite of opposition. Therefore it seems best to give some extracts from his own writings first that will reveal the tenor of his mind and the largeness of his heart and intellect, in order ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... But presently he jumped to a false conclusion. As he referred casually to Miss Pritchard as an inveterate optimist, suddenly all the color died out of the girl's face, the shadow in her eyes became momentarily genuine distress, and the bravado dropped from her manner. It struck him that there was some misunderstanding between his friend and her young cousin. And the pain this ...
— Elsie Marley, Honey • Joslyn Gray
... his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line in ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... must have bored him, so studiously does he through over thirty years avoid even a slanting glance at the events which preoccupied Mr. Punch in his cartoons. There is evidence that there was more than the policy of the Paper in this. Du Maurier was an optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... in a book, and calls it Seven Stormy Sundays. Mr. H. T. Tuckerman makes a book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is 'obvious.' An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience. Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... slip, and told Tony how sorry I was to hurt him. But he wasn't inclined to take that for an answer. He wanted to know if I wouldn't "leave it open," in case anything happened to make me change my mind. I warned him that, so far as I could see, I would never change it; but if an "optimist will op"—as Tony remarked—what can you do? You can't prevent his opping, and rather than hear an irrevocable word he bade me good-bye while I protested. This was in the midst of what should have been his second dance, and I didn't feel equal to going ...
— Secret History Revealed By Lady Peggy O'Malley • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... I am!" could only be exceeded by the veracity of the assertion. Mrs Brandon only joined in the prayer-meetings that he held at our house, when Ford himself was perfectly sober—thus she did not often attend—Brandon never. Whilst he wore the top-boots, he was an optimist, and perfectly epicurean in his philosophy—I use the term in the modern sense. When he had eighty pounds odd a year, with no family of his own, no man was more jovial or happy. He had the most perfect reliance ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... The obstinate optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath, strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed them of the hope which was but now as the ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... two people look at the same thing at the same time, and each of the two sees something entirely different from the other. Somebody has described the optimist as the man who sees the doughnut, while the pessimist sees nothing but the hole. So, also, you and I might see before us nothing but an unshapely block of marble, while the sculptor would see the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... main force, which was advancing from the direction of Dundee, Sir George White throughout the campaign consistently displayed one quality which is a charming one in an individual, but may be dangerous in a commander. He was a confirmed optimist. Perhaps his heart might have failed him in the dark days to come had he not been so. But whether one considers the non-destruction of the Newcastle Railway, the acquiescence in the occupation of Dundee, the retention of the non combatants ...
— The Great Boer War • Arthur Conan Doyle
... another of the obsequies with the comprehensive yet swift perception of an artist. An experience of three years on the staff had made him an expert on ceremonies, and, captious as he could be when the occasion merited his scorn, his predilection was for praise, as he was an optimist by instinct. This time he could praise unreservedly, and he was impatient to transfer to the pages of his note-book his seething impressions of the solemn beauty and simplicity of the last rites in the painful tragedy. In the rustic church into ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... his wife, she had stoically taken up the burden that had been his. At her husband's suggestion that he should cobble, Mrs. Grandoken had fitted up the little shop, telling him grimly that every hand in the world should do its share. And that was how Lafe Grandoken, laborer and optimist, began his life's great work—of cobbling a ray of comfort to every soul entering the shack. Sometimes he would insist that the sun shone brighter than the day before; then again that the clouds had a cooling effect. But if in the world outside Lafe found no comfort, he always ...
— Rose O'Paradise • Grace Miller White
... of the massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to perish by ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... and if a pursuer should follow him under the rock his only chance would lie in getting hold, after a fight, of the man's loaded revolver or ammunition-belt. Such a hope involved a great deal of confidence, but de Spain was an optimist—most railroad men are. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... to preach a crusade for Equality, he that thinks himself the equal of no one. If he were a bachelor, he would go into society; if he were in a fair way to be a Royalist poet with a pension and the Cross of the Legion of Honor, he would be an optimist, and journalism offers starting-points by the hundred. Journalism is the giant catapult set in motion by pigmy hatreds. Have you any wish to marry after this? Vernou has none of the milk of human kindness in him, it is all turned to gall; and he is emphatically ...
— Lost Illusions • Honore De Balzac
... its existence by its elimination. All lines along which the Mission works should one day become self-eliminating. Until that time arrives I am satisfied that the Mission has great opportunities before it. I am an optimist, and feel certain that God will provide the means to continue as ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... of the poets who have reached the heart of men, since Burns dropped the tear for poor "auld Nickie-ben" that softened the stony-hearted theology of Scotland, have had "non-clerical" minds, and I suppose our young friend is in his humble way an optimist like them. What he says in verse is very much the same thing as what is said in prose in all companies, and thought by a great many who are thankful to anybody that will say it for them,—not a few clerical as wall ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... to see Krestinsky, the Commissar of Finance, the curious little optimist whose report on the Extraordinary Tax I had heard at the last meeting of the Executive Committee. I found him in the Ilyinka street, in the Chinese town. I began by telling him that I did not believe that they meant to pay the ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... "The optimist notion, therefore, that Nature is an all-wise designer, in whose work order, system, wisdom, and beauty are prominent, does not fare well when placed under the microscope ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... the other illustration, is the reviewer so complete an optimist as to insist that the arrangement and the weapon are wholly perfect (quoad the insect) the normal use of which often causes the animal fatally to injure or to disembowel itself? Either way it seems to us that the argument ...
— Darwiniana - Essays and Reviews Pertaining to Darwinism • Asa Gray
... and there . . . something worse. Every advanced thinker, and the majority of theorists, could count on finding a sympathetic listener in him: and not infrequently they found in him an advocate also; such an arrant anti-optimist was the pestilent fellow. As if Civilization, after thousands of years of travail, had produced nothing better than a clumsy abortion with the claws of an animal and the tastes of Jack-an-ape! Why, the man must be mad, to have such irregular fancies! ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... But after leaving her I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week. Thus heartened by this ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... feel pessimistic; it is difficult to be an optimist when a long-planned scheme suddenly falls ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... man and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near repenting at leisure. Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom has a silver lining; and I had never any real fear that her nice young couple were becoming more than quite temporarily estranged. Still, things went so far that Sophia left the cottage where she and Arthur and a cooing dove had proposed to live ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... buildings rose up, numbers increased, and distinctions were won, but behind all the outward success was the vitalising energy of the Headmaster, the inspiration of the optimist, ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... bits of life. Happiness and sunshine, birds and trees alternated with the direst poverty in the slums, people on sick beds and death beds, in hospitals and in funeral processions; life pictures of successes and failures, of the discouraged, the despondent, the cheerful, the optimist and the pessimist, passed in quick succession and stamped themselves on the ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... an optimist and persuades himself he is improving, he does improve. This is the explanation of "Faith moving mountains", for the curative power of prayer, Christian Science, laying-on of hands, suggestion treatment and patent medicine, depends on man's own ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... I am an incorrigible optimist! and I truly believe that the world is advancing in every way and that we are already in the dawn of a new era of the understanding, and the exploitation for our benefit of the great forces of nature. But we of the majority of non-scientists, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... great losses, or defeats, or illness, or accidents, and have undergone no great struggles or privations; I have had no grouch, I have not wanted the earth. I am pessimistic by night, but by day I am a confirmed optimist, and it is the days that have stamped my life. I have found this planet a good corner of the universe to live in and I am not in a hurry to exchange it for any other. I hope the joy of living may be as keen with you, my dear boy, as it has been ...
— My Boyhood • John Burroughs
... personally, I am taking no share in his destruction. Any bird-lover, after reading the foregoing account, can scarcely have missed the undercurrent of my affection for the little rascal. He is a thorough optimist; he is absolutely persistent; no hardship seems to dampen his ardor. His heart is valiant above that of most birds so that he has dared to make of man his near neighbor when other birds consider him their worst enemy. I love ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... not jump to this conclusion. Writing on his novels, Mr. W. E. Henley called him "the great optimist." The Kreutzer Sonata is the work of a profound pessimist. Concluding What To Do, Tolstoi wrote a noble passage on the sacredness of motherhood. Now all that is changed. Motherhood must go too. It will take time, for the old Adam is strong in us. But go it must, and when we ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... the first French Revolution and the triumph of American Independence; and in a yet greater degree to the vast material prosperity and growth of population in England and her colonies and in America. It is also to be ascribed in a measure to the greater study of the philosophy of history. The optimist temperament of some great writers has assisted the creation of it, while the opposite character has led a few to regard the future of the world as dark. The 'spectator of all time and of all existence' sees more of 'the increasing purpose which ...
— The Republic • Plato
... sighed after vainly trying to smile. She was singularly quiet for a while. Her husband was enjoying himself immensely. He was an optimist, his wife inclined to pessimism. George Nelson believed in making the best of things that had already happened and making nothing of things to come until they came. Caroline, his wife, lived a great many ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... satisfactory things in this world, child," she said, beaming at me over her spectacles with the smile of the optimist who is born, not made. "There's a satisfaction in roundin' off the toe of a stockin', like I'm doin' now, and knowin' that your work's goin' to keep somebody's feet warm next winter. There's a satisfaction in bakin' a nice, light batch o' bread for the children to eat up. There's ...
— Aunt Jane of Kentucky • Eliza Calvert Hall
... disappointments—he was an optimist by nature. He saw the good side of everything, ...
— Little Journeys To The Homes Of Great Teachers • Elbert Hubbard
... disappointment struck Johnnie silent. Pros Passmore was an optimist, one who never used a strong word to express sorrow or dismay, but he came out of a brown study in which he had muttered, "Blaylock. No, Harp wouldn't do. Culp's. Sally Ann's not to be trusted. What about the Venable boys? No good"—to say with a distressed ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... kin to Huysmans's Soeurs Vatard or the "human document" of Degas. Renoir's philosophy is not profound; for him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in the old Swinburne days. He is a painter of joyous surfaces and he is an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air, sunshine, and beautiful women—can we ever forget his Jeanne Samary? A pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... language of good cheer and defiance. Yes, there it was, half covered by the ruins, but its head was erect in the midst of fire and disaster. Brought low, it was still alert above the wreckage. The child, the dreamer, the optimist, the egoist, and the man alive in Jean Jacques sprang into vigour again. It was as though the Cock of Beaugard had really summoned him to action, and the crowing had not been that of a barnyard bantam ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... George, reflectively, but with a mild change of tone. "Damn people! I can pull myself to pieces so much better than they can. You see, darling, you're such an optimist. Now, if you'd only just believe, as I do, that the world is a radically bad place, you wouldn't be so surprised when things of this sort happen. Eh, little person, has it been a radically bad place ...
— Sir George Tressady, Vol. I • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... entrusted the work of reconstruction, I am not going to sit down by the international roadside and rave about it. The way in which that social peril and that poverty have been borne by the vast majority of our population has been wholly admirable. I am optimist enough to see and salute a nobility of sacrifice in all classes which to my mind is earnest that the future of our half of the English-speaking race—of the other half no man need have any doubts—will be as great as was ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... wonder if I shall be able to run over again in March and see you. The Colonel of our gunners has just dashed in to ask me to luncheon before I go to the trenches. He says that he wants cheering up. I suppose he thinks me an optimist! What time would suit you best if I could get a week at the end of February or beginning of March? I know you said something about running across to Ireland again, and I do not wish to interfere with that. I do not know whether ...
— Letters of Lt.-Col. George Brenton Laurie • George Brenton Laurie
... concerning the gossip of the country. This comforted Sam strangely. Ed was a little, trim, round-headed man, with a cropped thatch of white, and dancing brown eyes. Sixty years had in nowise impaired his vigour. He was an incorrigible optimist and ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... the needs of this readjustment period, the volunteer should be an optimist, and should exercise common sense in guiding the adult over the first lap of the unfamiliar road. I have advised the volunteers who are now in France, and those preparing to go there, to take writing boards, games, bright, pithy stories, and a lot of nonsense verse. I have told ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... rising sun; running like silver threads through all the other music, could be heard the fine trills of the field sparrows; the swinging chant of the creeping warblers and the loud rattle of the Tennessee warblers ran high up in the scale, furnishing a gossamer tenor; that golden optimist, the Baltimore oriole, piped his cheery recitative in the tops of the trees; chickadees supplied the minor strains and tufted titmice the alto; four or five turtle doves soothed the ear with their meditative cooing; while the calls and songs of numerous jays ...
— Our Bird Comrades • Leander S. (Leander Sylvester) Keyser
... optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction. The underwriter, who had been trying to minimize the amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism. The ship has been stauncher, the skies more merciful, the seas ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... look upon optimism as a most quaint disease, an eruption that breaks out upon the soul, and destroys all its interest, all its beauty. The optimist dresses up the amazing figures of life like Dresden shepherds and shepherdesses, and pipes a foolish tune—the Old Hundredth or some such thing—for them to dance to. We cannot all refuse to see anything but ...
— The Green Carnation • Robert Smythe Hichens
... absurdity of this "optimist failure," "Brichanteau Actor," reminds one of Don Quixote, while his consummate good nature is almost equal to Sir Roger de Coverley's. The clever French author has made his actor tell for the most part his own story, and in a natural, easy manner—the perfection of ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... He's a combination of optimist and fatalist, I judge. He thinks nothing matters much, for everything is coming out all right ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... the doughnut, the Pessimist sees the hole. The Pessimist asks: "Is there any milk in that pitcher?" The Optimist asks: "Will you please pass the cream?" A Pessimist is a man who winds an eight-day clock every night. An Optimist is a man who gives his clock away so as not to lose any good time winding it. A Pessimist is a person so disagreeable, he won't eat anything that agrees with him. An Optimist ...
— Supreme Personality • Delmer Eugene Croft
... Being an optimist has compensations. Indeed, it would need to have, for no virtue has ever landed any one in more damnable scrapes than optimism has landed me. But before the crash comes it does help to ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... Food of Fiction "A Highly Valuable Chain of Thoughts" Matrimony Piscatori Piscator The Contented Angler Off my Game The Property of a Gentleman who has Given up Collecting The Ballade of the Subconscious Self Ballade of the Optimist Zimbabwe Love's Cryptogram Tusitala Disdainful Diaphenia Tall Salmacis Jubilee Poems What Francesco said of the Jubilee The Poet and the Jubilee On any Beach Ode of Jubilee Jubilee before Revolution Folk Songs French Peasant Songs ...
— New Collected Rhymes • Andrew Lang
... an article reprinted in the same booklet, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, that excellent weaver of mystery stories and sister of Hilaire Belloc, said: "Before all things Hugh Walpole is an optimist, with a great love for and a great belief in human nature. His outlook is essentially sane, essentially normal. He has had his reverses and difficulties, living in lodgings in remote Chelsea, depending entirely upon his own efforts. Tall and strongly built, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... doctrine of the survival of the fittest, might, if one had the time to make it all out, be shown to be the sufficient basis for a belief in, and a logical ground for anticipating, the progress of man toward moral and spiritual perfection. A healthy man is an optimist. Pessimism is the product of dyspepsia; and all the intermediate phases of philosophy come from some want of normal brain-action. Following out the Darwinian theory,—supported as it seems to be by the facts,—one ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... fellow like myself might have been ensnared with much less trouble. But for all this I love Him, and am persuaded that He has done all for my good, much as facts may seem to contradict it. We must take an optimist view for individuals as well as for humanity, despite the perpetual evidence of facts telling the other way. This is what constitutes true courage; I am the only person ...
— Recollections of My Youth • Ernest Renan
... ear, so that the philosophy of the Persian and the Roman might be reduced to something like a common denominator. Lucretius is so far a pessimist that, under existing conditions, human life is for him no more than a hideous nightmare; but he is so far an optimist that he looks upon all this misery as due to one removable cause, this cause being the prevalence of one mistaken belief, which a true scientific philosophy will altogether eradicate. The belief in question is a ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... was she punished for an infraction of the law. The next day the particulars were told me by the facetious Coroner himself, whose jury had just rendered a verdict of accidental drowning in both cases. I don't know when I have enjoyed a heartier laugh. The Optimist, and What He ...
— The Fiend's Delight • Dod Grile
... I fell in with Kellogg again; he found me trying the open-air cure on a bench in Washington Square. Since then he's been finding me one berth after another. He's a sure-enough optimist." ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... are not merely the expressions of a comfortable optimist. They are true to the facts of our current progress. There are vast portions of this country today in which the enterprising business man who can succeed in selling to the farmers an honest and effective commercial fertilizer ...
— The business career in its public relations • Albert Shaw
... corrugated-iron abode I thought it looked inviting enough; but I did not guess how fond I was to grow of its barn-like interior and of the sportive crew who shared its mathematically-allotted floor-space. "Next war," one optimist suggested during a typical Lights-Out seance, "let's all enlist together again." There were protests against the implied prophecy, but none against the proposition as such. That is the spirit of hut comradeship ... a ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... God or Nature will overcome the natural effects of our ignorance, laziness and viciousness by wonders, signs and metaphysics, or to deny the existence of sickness, sin and suffering, must lead inevitably to intellectual and moral stagnation and degeneration. I am a thorough and consistent optimist and New Thought enthusiast, but I do not overlook the fact that in this, as in everything else, there lurks always the danger of overdoing and of exaggerating virtue ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... us and bless us;" the comptroller-general, Herault de Sechelles, as well as the king and Madame de Pompadour, then and for a long while the reigning favorite, gave so favorable a reception to the hero of India that Dupleix, always an optimist, conceived fresh hopes. "I shall regain my property here," he would say, "and India will recover in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... renowned medical school of this city, and he could not therefore be much in want of society. With so many supposed comforts around him—with so many visions of wealth and splendour—one thing alone disturbed the peace of the poor optimist, and would indeed have confounded most bons vivants. "He was curious," he said, "in his table, choice in his selection of cooks, had every day a dinner of three regular courses and a dessert; and yet, somehow or other, everything he eat tasted of porridge." This dilemma could be no great ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... an optimist, Prince," said Hafner, "and whatsoever our friend Dorsenne here present may claim, it is necessary to ...
— Cosmopolis, Complete • Paul Bourget
... Evangeline, the optimist, was busy scratching up the more or less kindly fruits of the earth for her family and didn't make the slightest sign of recognition, though I ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... same social restlessness, the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the sober ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift" and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian professors of collegiate metaphysical ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... this case her bonte might have gone a little further. At any rate this was the only allusion that she made to his bothers and worries. Indeed, she always passed over such things lightly; she was an optimist for others as well as for herself, which doubtless had a great deal to do (Raymond indulged in the reflection) with the headway she made in a society ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... of an optimist as his reply would seem to indicate. It was his habit to hold bad news in reserve as long as possible, doubtless for the satisfaction it gave him to dribble it out sparingly. He had found it to his advantage to break all sorts of news hesitatingly to his master, for he was never ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... he felt more like laughing or crying. He was fairly close to home, anyhow. They did have space traffic here. And being pretty much of an optimist, he also decided that it was a time-track where he had been known. Only being so long overdue, he had probably ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... "An incurable optimist," Freddy chuckled. "You take after your mother. Believe me, Sam. There's never anything worthwhile ...
— Frigid Fracas • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... surprise At finding you, beneath your lion's skin, So sweet an optimist—whose faith can find All's for the best; and the best, this great ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... arranged his plans to take three hours for a certain pleasure. He lost his way and missed his pleasure, but was full of exuberant delight over his "new experience." "I saw places and met with adventures I might have missed my whole life." He was a true philosopher and optimist and such a man gets the very kernel out of ...
— The Heart of the New Thought • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... was a few weeks later, and I had just finished looking at the comic section of the Sunday Star. "I'm an optimist. I always have been. The older I get, the more I agree with Shakespeare and those poet Johnnies about it always being darkest before the dawn and there's a silver lining and what you lose on the swings you make up on the roundabouts. Look at Mr. Corcoran, for instance. There was a fellow, ...
— My Man Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... Monsignor, does my father exaggerate? For all this sounds too delightful to be true. Is it possible that his ideas meet with no opposition? Or is it that an opposition is preparing behind an ambuscade of goodwill? Father is such an optimist that any enthusiasm for his ideas convinces him that stupidity has ended in the world at last. But you will not be duped, Monsignor, for Rome is your native city, and his appointment of capelmeister is owing to you, and the kindly reception of my father's ideas—if they have been received ...
— Sister Teresa • George Moore |
