"Pessimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... "What a little pessimist you are, Dainty! Always turning your face to the darker side of life!" cried her lover, somewhat impatiently; adding: "Nothing shall happen to part us, my own little love; though if your aunt and cousins had their way, we would never see each other's ...
— Dainty's Cruel Rivals - The Fatal Birthday • Mrs. Alex McVeigh Miller
... Hallam sat still. I had offered to read to her, and she had declined. I glanced at her now and then. I had grown accustomed to that sarcastic, wrinkled, bitter face, and did not dislike it. Indeed, Miss Hallam had given me abundant proofs that, eccentric though she might be, pessimist in theory, merciless upon human nature, which she spoke of in a manner which sometimes absolutely appalled me, yet in fact, in deed, she was a warm-hearted, generous woman. She had dealt bountifully by me, and I knew she loved me, though she never ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a little pessimist it is to-day!" he interrupted. "Always coming at me with objections, eh?" He took her in his arms and kissed her. "I tell you Beta, this is no pipe-dream at all, or anything like it; the thing's reality—we're going to fly! But it'll mean the most tremendous ...
— Darkness and Dawn • George Allan England
... be so absolutely undisturbed in his confidence regarding his wife seemed nothing short of a miracle. When I now think of the riddle I see its solution in a modified version of the old rule concerning the mote in thy neighbor's eye and the beam in thine own eve. Your worst pessimist is, after all, an optimist with regard to himself. We are quick to recognize the gravity of ill health in somebody else, yet we ourselves may be on the very brink of death without realizing it. It is a special phase of selfishness. We are loath to connect the idea of a catastrophe ...
— The Rise of David Levinsky • Abraham Cahan
... of faults, I'll tell you to start with—plenty you may have noticed already, and plenty more you haven't had time to notice yet," said my new relative. "I'm a sulky brute, for one thing, and I've got to be a pessimist lately, for another—a horrid fault, that!—and I ...
— The Motor Maid • Alice Muriel Williamson and Charles Norris Williamson
... not forgotten when we saw Chicago burning in 1871, the doubts and fears of our own hearts regarding the future of our city. Jeremiads were oracularly and dolefully uttered by many a prophetic pessimist that Chicago would never be rebuilt, that it would be burned again if it should rise from its ashes. Well! it did rise. It was again sadly burned. It again arose. It has been rising and growing ever since. And it is now ready to send ...
— Complete Story of the San Francisco Horror • Richard Linthicum
... Tendril's Fate The Times The Question Sorrow's Uses If Which are you? The Creed to be Inspiration The Wish Three Friends You never can tell Here and now Unconquered All that love asks "Does it pay?" Sestina The Optimist The Pessimist An Inspiration Life's Harmonies Preparation Gethsemane God's Measure Noblesse Oblige Through Tears What we Need Plea to Science Respite Song My Ships Her Love If Love's burial "Love is enough" Life is a Privilege Insight A Woman's Answer The ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... very long that nearly every man one knows in New York is at best a mere cheered-up and plucky pessimist. Of course one has to go down and see one's favourite New Yorker, one needs to and wants to, and one needs to get wrought in with him too, but when one gets home, who is there who does not have to get free from his favourite New Yorker, shake himself off from him, save his ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Kemp that a sort of golden age had set in. On all the frontiers of her little kingdom there was peace and prosperity, and she woke each morning in a world so neatly smoothed and ironed out that the most captious pessimist could hardly have found anything in it ...
— The Adventures of Sally • P. G. Wodehouse
... authorities. Buddha, whom the Catholic Church converted to Saint Josaphat, refused to recognize Ishwara (the deity), on account of the mystery of the "cruelty of things." Schopenhauer, Miss Cobbe's model pessimist, who at the humblest distance represents Buddha in the world of Western thought, found the vision of man's unhappiness, irrespective of his actions, so overpowering that he concluded the Supreme Will to be malevolent, "heartless, cowardly, and arrogant." Confucius, the "Throneless ...
— The Kasidah of Haji Abdu El-Yezdi • Richard F. Burton
... man," he declares on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... accepts the belief that the evils before his eyes must be in fact greater, and not, as may perhaps be the case, only more vividly perceived, than those of the bygone ages. A call to repentance easily takes the form of an assertion that the devil is getting the upper hand; and we may hope that the pessimist view is only a form of the discontent which is a necessary condition of improvement. Anyhow, the diametrical conflict of prophecies suggests one remark which often impresses me. We are bound to call each other by terribly hard names. A gentleman assures me in print that I am playing ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... atmosphere, where men are accustomed to give a reason for the faith that is in them, and hence it is necessary, in opening any discussion such as he had provoked, that he should assign some ground of opposition or support—Christian, Pagan, utilitarian, constitutional, optimist, or pessimist. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... His intention, but a few days before the Passion, of returning to the grave of Lazarus, 'that we may die with Him.' 'He is going to His death, that I am sure of, and I am going to be beside Him even in His death.' A constitutional pessimist! The only other notice that we have of him is that he broke in—with apparent irreverence which was not real,—with a brusque contradiction of Christ's saying that they knew the way, and they knew ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture: St. John Chaps. XV to XXI • Alexander Maclaren
... mostly men engaged in a quest for the joys of life, but never attaining whole-hearted enjoyment, because of their innate streak of world-weariness. When the hero of his Anatol (1893) calls himself "light-hearted pessimist," Schnitzler creates a term which fits as well his Fedor in Maerchen (1894), his Fritz in Liebelei (1895), and other specimens of a type related to the heroes of Musset and other Frenchmen. His women, too, have a streak ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... created no jealousy and always unconsciously put herself at a disadvantage; men did not mind her prattle and coquettish airs, being well aware that nothing was expected of them. For Miss Luscombe, though vain, was a pessimist, and quite good-natured. She was ...
— The Limit • Ada Leverson
... on painful things—the blot on life's beauty, the shadow on its glory, the pitiful ending of its brave shows—only to gibe and mock. The realist lingers in the dissecting chamber for very delight in revolting themes. The pessimist enlarges on the power of melancholy that lie may justify despair. The poet touches the pathetic string that he may flutter the heart. Fiction dramatizes the tragic sentiment for the sake of literary effect. Cultured wickedness drinks wine out of a skull, that by sharp contrast ...
— The world's great sermons, Volume 8 - Talmage to Knox Little • Grenville Kleiser
... 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 have all brought our bodies ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... not a question of pessimism. Schopenhauer is generally, and with reason, regarded as a pessimist; but no one who has read his "World as Will and Idea" can visualise Schopenhauer, even in the sphere of pure ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... Nirvana is the goal of the world process. The vast scheme of nature, the slow growth of mind up the long scale of organic forms, the high intelligence that crowns the summit of life—all these exist to bring forth the pessimist. He alone has gained true culture, and reached a rational insight into the emptiness of existence. He alone has rent the veil of Maya and pierced the last illusion. His task is to waken humanity, now tossing on its bed of pain, from the spell of the great ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 24, November, 1891 • Various
... the pessimist cry, but unfortunately for Friend Pessimist, we have a gauge on the over-production idea that lays all fears to rest. When the supply of any commodity increases faster than the demand, we have over-production and falling prices. Vice-versa, under-production is shown ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... whoever foretells the future is equally a prophet, whether he announces the end of the world or foretells the dawn of a millennium. And history affords no presumption in favour of the prophet who prophesies smooth things. The prognostics of a pessimist may be as much belied by the event as the hopes of an optimist. But for one prophet to decry the predictions of another simply as prophecies is a downright absurdity. Even among rival soothsayers some regard must be had to fairness and ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... Santerre, resuming the pose of an elegant pessimist, "if she wishes to die, I shan't oppose her. In fact, I'm ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... reserve a good room for him," said John, "but although I don't want to appear a pessimist, Miss Julie, I don't think he'll come just now, at least not in the Arrow. All aeroplane, balloon and Zeppelin trains have stopped running during the blizzard. Blizzard is an American word of ...
— The Hosts of the Air • Joseph A. Altsheler
... see beauty and goodness where he could not personally detect them—and an equally passionate hater of evil. Read "The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg" and "The Mysterious Stranger." In his last years, torn by private sorrows, he turned as black a philosophical pessimist as we have bred. He died at his new country seat in Connecticut in 1910. Mr. Paine has written his life in three great volumes, and there is a twenty-five ...
— The American Spirit in Literature, - A Chronicle of Great Interpreters, Volume 34 in The - Chronicles Of America Series • Bliss Perry
... the most attractive and enterprising of the new Members. But I am afraid, despite his cheery appearance, that he is a bit of a pessimist. With Peace believed to be so near, it was distinctly depressing to find him calling attention to the danger of a deficiency of pit-props "in any future war," and refusing to be put off with the usual official answer, "in view of the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... contributed ideas to the subject of academic reform on more sides than one. But such matters he found desultory and unsatisfying; he was in a state of famine; his mind was suffering, not growing; he was becoming brooding, melancholy, taciturn, and finally pessimist (pp. 306, 307). Pattison was five-and-forty before he reached the conception of what became his final ideal, as it had been in a slightly different shape his first and earliest. He had always been a voracious reader. When 'the flood of the Tractarian infatuation ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... and is based upon the order of nature. Although savage passions, excited by an imperfect understanding of the truth, do from time to time cause the overthrow of given societies, and arouse the horror and alarm of pessimist votaries of myth, nature is not thereby overcome; she still triumphs, and restores the order which has been interrupted, so far as the instinct of conservatism and the hereditary impulse to that special form of association to which each people ...
— Myth and Science - An Essay • Tito Vignoli
... plays skittles with dulness, dulness gets revenge by taking wit at his word. Vast numbers of people taking Thackeray at his word consider him a bitter pessimist. ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Vol. 1 of 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Good Men and Great • Elbert Hubbard
... 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 bit of homely ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... a pessimist, sat beside fat Uncle Joseph during their long, long drive, relatives of hers were indeed going into fits; at least, so Florence would have described their gestures and incoherences of comment. Moreover, ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... a fraction of a pessimist among them! How well they understand life! A beautiful convent, beautiful nature, good wine and good cheer, neither disturbance nor care; neither wife nor children; and when they leave the world, heaven specially ...
— Seeing Europe with Famous Authors, Volume VI • Various
... cynic or pessimist was Louis McGregor Abraham, proprietor of the Imperial Hotel—Syrian by birth, Jew by creed, Englishman by nationality, and admirer first, last and all the time of all things prosperous and promising, except ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... according to his programme, and had the result been happier? He who gets his wish often suffers a sharper disappointment than he who loses it. "So taeuscht uns also bald die Hoffnung, bald das Gehoffte," says the great pessimist, and Fate is never more ironical than when she humors our whim. Doddridge alone, who had thrown himself confidingly into the arms of the Destinies, had obtained ...
— Stories by American Authors, Volume 8 • Various
... hand, Governments cannot really divest themselves of religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints declare, some of them in the name of Jesus himself, that this world is a vale of tears, ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... come in the years preceding. Indeed, when we look back over that little stretch of time and observe the mighty changes which have come within our movement; when we hear the reports of the awakening of men and women to the justice of our cause all the way around the world, I am sure that there is no pessimist among us who does not realize that at last the tide of woman's ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... said that although the war has had for my country the most cruel consequences, there is one consolation to it. It has shown that humility is better than the pessimist had said it was, and that money is not the only god before which the nations bow. It has revealed that all over the world, and especially in America, there is a respect for right and for duty; it has proved that the moral beauty of an action is fully appreciated. ...
— Defenders of Democracy • The Militia of Mercy
... brains, nor numbers, nor money—save ammunition. Does any pessimist intend to argue that we shall not get all the ammunition we need? It is inconceivable that we should not get it. When we have got it the end can be foretold like the ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 5, August, 1915 • Various
... didn't do it. Like all great moral teachers he acted on the assumption that there is more freedom of will than seemed theoretically possible. It was the same way with his views of national affairs. Jeremiah's reputation is that of a pessimist. Still, when the country was in the hands of Nebuchadnezzar and he was in prison for predicting it, he bought a piece of real estate which was in the hands of the enemy. He considered it a good investment. "I subscribed the deed and sealed it, and called ...
— Humanly Speaking • Samuel McChord Crothers
... in the bad humor of an elderly man after a day's pleasure, and in the self-reproach of a pessimist who has lost his point of view for a time, and has to work back to it. He began at the belated breakfast with his daughter when she said, after kissing him gayly, in the small two-seated bower where they breakfasted at their hotel when they did not go to the Posthof, "Didn't you have ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... letter from the deceased about ten days before his death, containing some passages which the coroner read aloud: "Do you know anything of Schopenhauer? I mean anything beyond the current misconceptions? I have been making his acquaintance lately. He is an agreeable rattle of a pessimist; his essay on 'The Misery of Mankind' is quite lively reading. At first his assimilation of Christianity and Pessimism (it occurs in his essay on 'Suicide') dazzled me as an audacious paradox. But there is truth in it. Verily, the whole creation groaneth ...
— The Big Bow Mystery • I. Zangwill
... From Marthe to La-Bas every story, every volume, disengages the same atmosphere—the atmosphere of a London November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation—and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each of us, what each ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... 'Pessimist! Haven't I written proof of good faith in my pocket—official letters of recall, received to-day? It's one deception the less, you see; for those letters may have been opened; skilfully done it's impossible to detect. When ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... two hundred pounds for the wheat he saw nothing but success and happiness ahead. His faith in the farm and farming swelled. Dad was not a pessimist—when he had ...
— On Our Selection • Steele Rudd
... thought which has been indicated, and the quality of style which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest—the greatest—theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... stronger that Fortune would shed her golden smile upon us before night. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the optimistic spirits of most were beginning to flag a little. Only Mr. Shaw, though banned as a confirmed doubter and pessimist, now by the exercise of will kept the others to their task. It took all Cuthbert Vane's loyalty, plus an indisposition to be called a slacker, to strive against the temptation to renounce treasure-hunting in favor of roaming with Crusoe and me. As for Captain Magnus, his ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... the nineteenth century pessimist. But, as before, the sprouting of new thought and belief is visible to the attentive eye all over the surface of the sordid field of a decaying civilization. The time has come when the spirit of Columbus' symbol shall avouch itself, vindicating the patient ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 19, June, 1891 • Various
... illustrious Taine, would gain admission. His work, he himself declared, "was nothing but pure or applied psychology," and psychology is apt to clash with the facts of history. Scherer described Taine, somewhat unjustly, as "a pessimist in a passion," whilst the critical and conscientious Aulard declared that his work was "virtually useless for the purposes of history." Mr. Gooch classes Sorel's work as "incomparably higher" than that of Taine. Montalembert is an extreme case of a French historian who ...
— Political and Literary essays, 1908-1913 • Evelyn Baring
... dismal argument, full of words and repetitions but with few ideas, and from the trend of it the curious fact appeared that La Touche, the ship's grouser and dismal James, was taking the optimistical side, whilst Bompard, generally cheerful, was the pessimist. ...
— The Beach of Dreams • H. De Vere Stacpoole
... you," said Happy as he gazed contentedly into the coals over which the hog had been roasted in sections, "that those who look hard generally discover, that is, 'seek and ye shall find.' It's the optimists who arrive. Your pessimist quits before he comes to the apple trees, or before he reaches the thicket that conceals the fine fat pig. As for me, I'm always an optimist, twenty-four carats fine, and therefore I'm ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... be cheerful. You've got a man who can't live when you're out of his sight. He's like a fish on dry land.... And you—why, once you were an old pessimist!" ...
— The Man of the Forest • Zane Grey
... continued his train of thought, 'I felt certain somehow that it would be a failure. Wasn't it odd? I often think I'm a pessimist, and yet look how well I'm taking it. I'm more like a fatalist—sometimes I hardly know ...
— Tenterhooks • Ada Leverson
... it is like our Mr. GALSWORTHY to assume that things will be as black as ever a few years hence. 'Tis, no doubt, what encourages us to keep our end up in the great War. But we know the customs of leopards, and can forgive our pessimist for his creations (for all the world as if he were a milliner) of Poulder, Lord William's butler, rounded pillar of the eternal old order of things; of James, revolutionary but faithful (of course James never would in fact have kept this absurd job); of a light ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... happy man with an imperturbable digestion to be a pessimist. He is always inclined to give Nature the benefit of the doubt. His favourite term for this mental complaisance is "catholicity of faith," or, it may be, "a divine hope." The less fortunate brethren bewail the laws of Nature, and doubt a future readjustment, because of stomachs chronically ...
— Life of Robert Browning • William Sharp
... a really great poem on these terms, though deprived of the concrete imagery of a Dante or a Milton. If he had fairly grasped some definite conception of the universe, whether pantheistic or atheistic, optimist or pessimist, proclaiming a solution of the mystery, or declaring all solutions to be impossible, he might have given forcible expression to the corresponding emotions. He might have uttered the melancholy resignation and the confident hope incited in different minds by a contemplation of the mysterious world. ...
— Alexander Pope - English Men of Letters Series • Leslie Stephen
... in a mist of vague and stormy emotionalism. His present passion was for clearness. So he boldly decided to convert the old tragedy of sin and suffering into a drama of mental clearing-up. The early Faust—the pessimist, murderer, seducer—was to be presented as temporarily wandering in the dark; as a man who had gone grievously wrong in passionate error, but was essentially "good" by virtue of his aspiring nature, and hence, in the Lord's fulness of time, was to be led out into the light and ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, • Editor-in-Chief: Kuno Francke
... bite to eat in the morning. Put your head into this 10-cent lodging house if you want to get some new ideas regarding the "trend of humanity." Glance into this low groggery—but one of several thousand in this great city—and "size up the gang" before being too sure that a "pessimist" is simply a person troubled with a superabundance of black bile. Of the million people who make up this great city, probably six hundred thousand are already plunged deep in the abyss where lurk Want and Crime, or trembling on its verge, and ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... (Weltanschauung und Lebensansicht). And it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... the letter. I am no pessimist—but also no optimist. The world might be much worse, and it might be much better. Of moral purpose I see no trace in Nature. That is an article of exclusively human manufacture—and ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 3 • Leonard Huxley
... ever been deemed by the close students of life as a most essential element in the achievement of the highest and fullest success. The optimist sees open paths leading to pleasant and prosperous fields of endeavor where the pessimist can see no way out of the hopeless surroundings amid which he has been thrust by an unkind fate. The disposition to seize upon the opportunities lying close at hand and to believe that the here and now is full of sunshine and golden possibilities has carried many a one ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... desires were stronger than his will. There are points of Byron's character with regard to which opinion is divided. Candid he certainly was to the verge of brutality, but was he sincere? Was [v.04 p.0904] he as melancholy as his poetry implies? Did he pose as pessimist or misanthropist, or did he speak out of the bitterness of his soul? It stands to reason that Byron knew that his sorrow and his despair would excite public interest, and that he was not ashamed to exhibit "the ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... for subsistence now keen to a degree which could not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... Human suffering is so great, so endless, so awful that I can hardly write of it. I could not go into hospitals and face it, as some do, lest my mind should be temporarily overcome. The whole and the worst the worst pessimist can say is far beneath the least particle of the truth, so immense is the misery of man. It is the duty of all rational beings to acknowledge the truth. There is not the least trace of directing intelligence in human affairs. This is a foundation ...
— The Story of My Heart • Richard Jefferies
... "Commissioners," with their fore-ordained mission of lowering Dick's rents, rents that, in Dick's opinion, were already philanthropically low. Major Talbot-Lowry, like many of his tribe, though a pessimist in politics, was an optimist in most other matters, and found it impossible to conceive a state of affairs when he would be unable to do—approximately—whatever he had a mind for. At the age of fifty-eight, ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... it by superstition." And this was certainly his considered view. His common sense prevented him from indulging in Utopian speculations about the future; and his cynicism constantly led him to use the language of a pessimist. But at an early stage of his career he had taken up arms for human nature against that "sublime misanthrope" Pascal, who "writes against human nature almost as he wrote against the Jesuits"; and he returned to the attack at the end of his life. ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... "Come in, pessimist, and don't begin by being epigrammatic on the very doorstep. Tea? Or coffee? I'm afraid the flat doesn't run ...
— The Moon out of Reach • Margaret Pedler
... This little book of savage satires will rather dismay the simple-minded reader. Into the acid vials of his song Mr. Dulcet has poured a bitter cynicism. He seems to us to be an irremediable pessimist, a man of brutal and embittered life. In one poem, however, he does soar to a very fine imaginative height. This is the ode "On Losing a Latchkey," which is worth all the rest of the ...
— Mince Pie • Christopher Darlington Morley
... business needs a pessimist and an optimist, with ample opportunities to quarrel. Johnson is a jackass, but honest. He is a pessimist and has a pea-green liver. Listen to him and the business will die painlessly, by inches. Applerod is also a jackass, and ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave—all this I put up with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then for ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... The streets are choked with messy mist; I'm the proverbial Bachelor, An old, prosaic Pessimist. Yet somehow—who can tell me why?— Urged by the Past's dim Phantom, I'm Disposed my cosy Club to fly, And prank ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... The pessimist role is a modern day fad, But, Roger, you make a poor cynic, my lad. Your heart at the core is as sound as a nut, Though the wheels of your mind have dropped into the rut Of wrong thinking. You need a strong hand on the lever Of good ...
— Three Women • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... not a thin leucocytic ichor. I have no sympathy with that pseudo-civilization which apparently has for its object the destruction of the human race by the production of a race of bodiless women. If I am to be a pessimist, I will be one out and out, and seek to destroy the race in a high-handed and manly way. Indoor life, inactivity, lack of oxygen in the lungs, these are things which in time produce a white skin, but do it by sacrificing every other ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol III, After-Dinner Speeches P-Z • Various
... cried out within me: "The devil I won't, O, you inventor of rain-water creeks!" Hour by hour, day by day, against almost continual head winds and with the lowest water in years, that discouraging prophecy invaded me and was repulsed. And that is why we have pessimists in the world. A pessimist is merely a counter-irritant. ...
— The River and I • John G. Neihardt
... no ambition to become either a cynic, a pessimist, or an iconoclast. To aspire in either of these directions is bad for the digestion, and good digestion is the foundation and source of much that is desirable in human affairs. Introspection has its uses, to be sure, but the stomach should have exemption as an objective. ...
— Reveries of a Schoolmaster • Francis B. Pearson
... would be the man to put everything right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than the pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory of human nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like David Hume thinks that almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative, and wishes to keep ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... he ceased from wood-chopping, and began to make more than a mere living. Nor was he downhearted when the scurvy broke out on his own body. Ever he ran his trap-lines and sang his ancient chant. Nor could the pessimist shake his surety of the three hundred thousand of Alaskan gold he as going to shake out ...
— The Red One • Jack London
... a satirist, because he could not endure to see all his pure ideals and the possibilities of perfection soiled and trampled upon by thoughtless mechanics, aimless mockers and babbling reformers. The humorist may be—and very often is—a sceptic, a pessimist, a nihilist; the satirist is invariably a believer, an optimist, an idealist. For let this dangerous man only come face to face, not with his enemies, but with his ideals, and you will see—as in "Atta Troll"—what a generous friend, what an ardent lover, what ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that all flesh is grass. Some people escape the disease by virtue of much philosophy or much ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... we stand on our national energy effort today reminds me of the old argument about whether the tank is half full or half empty. The pessimist will say we have half failed to achieve our 10-year energy goals; the optimist will say that we have half succeeded. I am always an optimist, but we must make up for ...
— State of the Union Addresses of Gerald R. Ford • Gerald R. Ford
... of holiday spirits (pp. 166-67). "If the universe is a thing which had better not have existed," says Strauss, "then surely the speculation of the philosopher, as forming part of this universe, is a speculation which had better not have speculated. The pessimist philosopher fails to perceive that he, above all, declares his own thought, which declares the world to be bad, as bad also; but if the thought which declares the world to be bad is a bad thought, then it follows naturally that the world is good. As a rule, optimism may take ...
— Thoughts out of Season (Part One) • Friedrich Nietzsche
... he was a pessimist about this world and an optimist about the next; for that is usually the state of mind of those who labour under any material or bodily disability, from slavery, which is the worst, ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... have never been a pessimist or a scaremonger, but without some of these men I don't believe we women would have won the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, Jan. 1, 1919 • Various
... anyway." The tall man swung round: "Freedom! do you call it a free land, where—" He gave instances of the power of the dollar. The other man kept up the argument by spitting and by asseveration. As the busy little tugs, with rugs on their noses, butted the great liner into her narrow dock, the pessimist launched his last shafts. The short man denied nothing. He drew the cigar from his lips, shot it back with a popping noise into the round hole cigars had worn at the corner of his mouth, and said, "Anyway, it's some country." I was introduced ...
— Letters from America • Rupert Brooke
... she could never comprehend was the pessimism that so often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all when he once got started ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... good deal for the despairing man. There were still some traces of the handsome Jim Bolivar with whom pretty, romantic Helen Bladen had eloped, though the intermediate years of sorrow and misfortune had changed that dapper young beau into a careless, hopeless pessimist. What the end might have been but for Peggy is hard to guess, but the past two years had made him think and think hard too. Though still slipshod of speech as the result of associating with his humbler neighbors, he was certainly ...
— Peggy Stewart at School • Gabrielle E. Jackson
... to the beginning of things yet," he interrupted, following up the line of thought the Maluka had at first suggested. "Before any trees are cut down, we'll have to dig a saw-pit and find a pit-sawyer." Dan was not a pessimist; he only liked to dig down to the very root of things, besides objecting to sugar-coated pills as being a hindrance ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... and out of this chaotic contest of hostile forces, mankind issues divided into castes, enslaved to despots, separated into States always ready to wage war against each other. And, with this history of mankind in his hands, the pessimist philosopher triumphantly concludes that warfare and oppression are the very essence of human nature; that the warlike and predatory instincts of man can only be restrained within certain limits by a strong authority which enforces peace and thus gives an ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... pessimist, "is the fly in all this precious ointment?" Alasl It is not a game fish; it will not take bait, spoon, or fly, and its finest properties vanish in a few hours ...
— The Arctic Prairies • Ernest Thompson Seton
... contrasted with that of the rank and file of recent minor poets in being impassioned rather than ingenious, luxuriant rather than finished. Neither symboliste nor decadent, he was a pessimist in so far as that character applies to a man who looks at the worst contingencies as well as the best in the human condition. Being little attracted by excellences of form and rhythm apart from content, he sometimes, when feeling outran his artistic speed, perpetrated ...
— Wessex Tales • Thomas Hardy
... over the sorrows and sufferings of mankind, and views with an unutterable grief the dismemberment of Christendom, he refuses to style himself a pessimist. There is much good in the world; he is continually being astonished by the goodness of individuals; he cannot bring himself to despair of mankind. Ah, if he had only kept himself in that atmosphere! But "it is very hard to ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... that the world is condemned by man is proof that there dwells in man something better than the world, whose evidence the pessimist himself cannot escape. All is not wrong, as long as wrong seems wrong. The pessimist, in condemning the world, must except himself. In his very charge against God of having made man in His anger, there lies a contradiction; for he himself fronts and defies the outrage. ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... great—it is well known that Schopenhauer also was unsuccessful in his efforts; and whoever has thoroughly realized how absurdly false and sentimental this proposition is, in a world whose essence is Will to Power, may be reminded that Schopenhauer, although a pessimist, ACTUALLY—played the flute... daily after dinner: one may read about the matter in his biography. A question by the way: a pessimist, a repudiator of God and of the world, who MAKES A HALT at morality—who assents to morality, ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... one thing in the world I can't stand," proceeded Gussie, "it's a pessimist. Be optimists, boys. You all know the difference between an optimist and a pessimist. An optimist is a man who—well, take the case of two Irishmen walking along Broadway. One is an optimist and one is a pessimist, just as one's name is Pat and the other's Mike.... Why, hullo, Bertie; ...
— Right Ho, Jeeves • P. G. Wodehouse
... futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium poisoning, to be dealt with by seizing the patients ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... convenient modern theatre that Wayworth first proceeded. He spent a late hour with Mrs. Alsager, an hour that throbbed with calculation. She told him that Mr. Loder was charming, he had simply taken up the play in its turn; he had hopes of it, moreover, that on the part of a professional pessimist might almost be qualified as ecstatic. It had been cast, with a margin for objections, and Violet Grey was to do the heroine. She had been capable, while he was away, of a good piece of work at that foggy ...
— Nona Vincent • Henry James
... claims to belong as little to the Pessimist as to the Bombastic school—to borrow Mr. Seeley's phrase—unless it is to be a Pessimist to seek a foothold in positive conditions and to insist on facing hard facts. The sense of English kinship is as lively in us ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 9: The Expansion of England • John Morley
... and optimistic dominie," said Senator Gruff, "was being shown through Sing Sing Prison. In his company went a pessimist who took darkling views of humanity in the lump, and particularly what fractions of the lump had gotten themselves locked up. The pessimist could see ...
— The President - A novel • Alfred Henry Lewis
... length of the war and its seriousness. In all wars nations are apt to minimize their dangers and the duration. Men, after all, see the power of their own country; they cannot visualize the power of the enemy. I have been accounted as a pessimist among my friends in thinking the war would not be over before Christmas. I have always been convinced that the result is inevitably a triumph for this country. I have also been convinced that that result will not be secured without a prolonged struggle. I will tell you why. I shall do so not in ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... weak, as he improvised much; but they are interesting, as they usually treat of homely topics (Poesias completas: El arpa del amor, 1891; Hogar y patria, 1891; Leyendas, 1898; Flores del alma; Recuerdos y esperanzas, 1899, Garnier, Paris). The romantic pessimist, Manuel Gutierrez Najera (d. 1888), was tormented throughout life by the vain quest of happiness and the thirst of truth. His verses, which are often elegiac or fantastic, are highly admired by the younger generation of Mexican poets. In a letter to the ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... hand, had no such scruples. She was more like Esther in nature, with a touch of cynicism curling her dainty lip, arising, perhaps, from an early divination that she was to lack Esther's opportunities. Perhaps it was because she was the pessimist—the quite cheerful pessimist—of the family, that she was by far the cleverest and most industrious at the housework. If it was her fate to be Cinderella, she might as well make the best of it, with a cynical endurance and good-humour, and be Cinderella with a good grace. Probably the ...
— Young Lives • Richard Le Gallienne
... light treatment of deep problems current among Epicureans than the solemn earnestness of Lucretius. He cannot leave the world to its vanity and enjoy himself. He seeks to bring men to his views, but at the same time he sees how hopeless is the task. He becomes a pessimist: in Roman language, he despairs of the Republic. He is a lonely spirit, religious even in his anti-religionism, full of reverence, but ignorant what to worship; a splendid poet, feeding his spirit on the ...
— A History of Roman Literature - From the Earliest Period to the Death of Marcus Aurelius • Charles Thomas Cruttwell
... State, both were more than seventy years old and had been successful in the acquisition of millions by methods of their own invention. They were no doubt equally unscrupulous, but, while Drew was by nature a pessimist and "bearish," Vanderbilt, in the Wall Street vernacular, was ...
— The Railroad Builders - A Chronicle of the Welding of the States, Volume 38 in The - Chronicles of America Series • John Moody
... Glenbrook, County Cork, Ireland, April 26, 1880,—three days and three hundred and sixteen years (?) after Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. Education: none or very little, and less German than French. Profession: pessimist. Chief interests: Russian Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... God! you will be deceived just the same," said Athos, who was an optimist when things were concerned, and a pessimist when men were in question. "They will promise everything for the sake of the money, and on the road fear will prevent them from acting. Once taken, they will be pressed; when pressed, they will confess ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... The pessimist is convinced that the world is a bad place, the optimist is sure that it can be good. That is the point of the book. Chesterton has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he says so ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... it would be perfect. He called Prince Bentrik and Alvyn Karffard to him; they found the idea instantly convincing. They talked about it through dinner, and held a general discussion afterward. Even Guatt Kirbey, the ship's pessimist, could find no objection to it. Trask and Bentrik began at once making battle plans. Karffard wondered if they hadn't better wait till they got to Gimli and ...
— Space Viking • Henry Beam Piper
... threw up his shoulders, and after a pause confessed. "You see, try as I will, I can't make a pessimist out of myself. We are all compensated, and I more fully than most men. What end? I asked, and the answer forthcame: Since the ultimate end is beyond us, then the immediate. More ...
— A Daughter of the Snows • Jack London
... nothing but a little black heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the energy, but in the effect. When the optimist has ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... Bugsey, the pessimist. "Let her dare to not," said Jimmy gravely, "and she shall know that ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... examined these alternatives narrowly. If he stayed where he was he would have to spend the night on this dashed landing. If he legged it, in this kit, he would be gathered up by the constabulary before he had gone a hundred yards. He was no pessimist, but he was reluctantly forced to the conclusion that he was up ...
— Indiscretions of Archie • P. G. Wodehouse
... the drawing-room, 'dancing,' as Danjou said, 'before the Ark.' He stretched and bent his unwieldy person in all directions. He would challenge to a philosophic duel the young critic, a confirmed pessimist of three-and-twenty, and overwhelm him with his own imperturbable optimism. Laniboire the philosopher had one particular reason for this good opinion of the world; his wife had died of diphtheria caught from nursing their children; both his children had died with their mother; and each ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... entrance fee— And Nibbs is on the list Of patrons who support a free Impartial pessimist; Yet shall his faith not wholly burst; He shares, in common with his "Cap'n," The view that, when we reach the worst, Then nothing worse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... are a pessimist about things as they are, like any good revolutionist. You believe that you are going to improve life at Castro. You alone?" "I, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... intellectual and strong-feeling people driven to despair must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment against ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... would have nothing to do with him. He was not quite an out-and-out pessimist, it was true; but he seemed to look on the Community as a most clumsily-articulated creature—a thing of shreds and patches, and the Cheap Jack of shams. He was always putting his finger on this spot or that; hinting that here there was a weakness, and there . . . something ...
— Drolls From Shadowland • J. H. Pearce
... "No, my pessimist, they were not! She had diagnosed me as a six and a half, and six and a half I am, so all was peace and joy. I put on a new pair the next day when I went out for a constitutional. It was quite a tonic. Gloves ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... and some detestable, but every one of them very interesting. And now I miss the wonder of it all. You will presently discover, my dear, that youth is only an ingenious prologue to whet one's appetite for a rather dull play. Eh, I am no pessimist,—one may still find satisfaction in the exercise of mind and body, in the pleasures of thought and taste and in other titillations of one's faculties. Dinner is good and sleep, too, is excellent. ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... if the parrot don't die," said the dainty pessimist, still harping on his pet theme. "All that bread ...
— Many Cargoes • W.W. Jacobs
... poem is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth to say ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... hundred years since Shelley proclaimed this birth of a new race throughout Europe. Would he have turned pessimist if he had lived to see the world infected with Prussianism as it has been in our time? I do not think he would. He would have been the singer of the new race to-day as he was then. To him the resurrection of the old despotism, foreign and domestic, would have seemed but a fresh assault by the Furies ...
— The Art of Letters • Robert Lynd
... the pains of unfolding in private his information and conclusions on this subject to one of those leaders, the answer given ran thus: "Your intentions are patriotic and your accuracy of observation is probably scientific. But your conclusions are wholly erroneous. You must admit that you are a pessimist. Nor can you deny that we members of the Cabinet dispose of fuller and more decisive data for a judgment than you, with all your opportunities, can muster. After all, we do know something of the temper of the German Government. ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... world 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 ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... Dr Pessimist Anticant was a Scotchman, who had passed a great portion of his early days in Germany; he had studied there with much effect, and had learnt to look with German subtilty into the root of things, and to examine for himself their intrinsic worth and worthlessness. ...
— The Warden • Anthony Trollope
... already to sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist is capable of turning optimist ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... regarding the optimist, the pessimist, and the vacillating man, from the designing and manufacturing point of view of a machine business, applies with equal force to the ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... They know that you are a bore or not a bore, a grouser or not a grouser, generous or mean, sentimental or cynical, an optimist or a pessimist, and that you have or have not a sense of humour. None of these is a criminal offence. Is there anything else that your friends can say about you which can establish the likelihood of your innocence? Not very much. Nor should we be flattered if there were. When somebody says of us, ...
— If I May • A. A. Milne
... object of their trust. Like the Israelites of old, they succeed at length in escaping from the hands of oppression and tyranny, but only to wander in a desert land throughout the length of their days. This is the region where dwell the pessimist, the skeptic and the cynic—miserable mortals that have wasted on creatures the talents they should have given to their Creator, or that have otherwise failed in their conception of life, and have left unmultiplied the money of the Master.(92) There ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... healthiest of all lives. It is only in theory that solitude is morbid. If you knew more of the world, Miss Thurwell, you would understand something of its cramping influence upon all independent thought. I am not a pessimist—at least, I try not to be. I do not wish to say that there is more badness than goodness in the world, but there is certainly more littleness than greatness. To live in any manner of society without imbibing a certain form of selfishness is difficult; ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... next letter to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should be a member of it. In much of his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... pessimist has all the tenderness of a Buddhist for animals, whom the gospels despise. When he pities the animals, who are worth more than ourselves, their executioners, when he pities the elementary existences, the plants ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... "thinking" is just the discovery of convenient phrases or labels, such as "pessimist," or "socialist," or "pacifist" or "Bolshevik." When any puzzling mental attitude comes before their notice, they pin one of their labels to it, and, having labelled it, they think they understand it. The Press supplies them ...
— Combed Out • Fritz August Voigt
... of the murder had yet entered it in connection with his boy; and to hear so emphatic an echo to his foreboding was more than his fretted nerves could stand. In the same breath he pounced on Thrush for a pessimist—apologised—and humbly entreated him to take a ...
— The Camera Fiend • E.W. Hornung
... too, like Sylvia? Pray don't be pessimistic. There is a dreadful pessimist in my book, who always thinks the worst is going ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... typical of many modern fathers? Alas! many of them only differ in not openly professing such cynicism, for they are better educated, more cultured, but their philosophy is essentially the same as his. Perhaps I am a pessimist, but you have agreed to forgive me. Let us agree beforehand, you need not believe me, but let me speak. Let me say what I have to say, and remember something ...
— The Brothers Karamazov • Fyodor Dostoyevsky
... a day, and sometimes expanding his chest to its utmost and extending his arms to the zenith, yawned prodigiously. Born a true pessimist, often was bored to the extreme by existence. In addition to the fortnightly symphony concerts and their necessary rehearsals, he did nothing but compose and dream of new spaces to conquer. He was a Czar over his orchestra, and ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... after week in the same place, surrounded by the same faces, and feeding on the same indifferent food. One was buoyed up by the reports published from time to time of the hauls of prisoners made by the various columns, but there was always some pessimist handy to discount one's hopes, and even though the result proved their dismal croakings more or less correct, they might have had the grace, even if they had not the common sense, to keep their miserable opinions to themselves. Thank goodness ...
— The Second Battalion Royal Dublin Fusiliers in the South African War - With a Description of the Operations in the Aden Hinterland • Cecil Francis Romer and Arthur Edward Mainwaring
... this stranger, his curiosity, occasioned no self-questionings, no probing into motives. For the time being his customary attitude of mind—that of the pessimist sceptically weighing every emotion—deserted him. He had been, in his small circle in Chisley, the one person with a tangible grievance against life, but here he found another at more bitter variance with Fate, and weaker by far for the fight. A mutual grievance ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... Hump," he said, closing the book upon his finger and looking up at me. "The Preacher who was king over Israel in Jerusalem thought as I think. You call me a pessimist. Is not this pessimism of the blackest?—'All is vanity and vexation of spirit,' 'There is no profit under the sun,' 'There is one event unto all,' to the fool and the wise, the clean and the unclean, the sinner and ...
— The Sea-Wolf • Jack London
... among all the novelists of the contemporary school. There are characters in his works quite as depraved as those in Flaubert and in Zola. But from the way in which he describes them one feels that he despises their ignominy, and that he is indignant at their baseness. Now the pessimist, in whose eyes baseness and ignominy are the very essence of man, is no longer capable of indignation or contempt. Nearly always Daudet's books present to us, if only incidentally, some favourite character which does credit ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... That interesting pessimist, Herr Arthur Schopenhauer, advocates universal polygamy upon the theory that all women would thus be supported. To the unprejudiced observer who reads the comic papers and goes to afternoon receptions, it would seem that each woman should have several husbands, to pay her bills ...
— The Spinster Book • Myrtle Reed
... great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine of the main chance; empiricism, as the philosophy ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... optimist, having a cogent answer to all gloomy predictions; from 1895 to 1902 he was a pessimist; yet reasons just as strong may be adduced for considering the future of the country secure in the later as were urged in the earlier period. But as Godkin grew older, he became a moral censor, and it is characteristic of censors to exaggerate both the evil of the present ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... Gustave Flaubert, pessimist and master of cadenced lyric prose, urged young writers to lead ascetic lives that in their art they might be violent. Chopin's violence was psychic, a travailing and groaning of the spirit; the bright roughness ...
— Chopin: The Man and His Music • James Huneker
... satisfactorily smoked: Mr. Peridon traced mortal evil to that act. Dr. Schlesien had his German views, Colney Durance his ironic, Fenellan his fanciful and free-lance. And here was an optimist, there a pessimist; and the rank Radical, the rigid Conservative, were not wanting. All of them were pointedly opposed, extraordinarily for so small an assembly: absurdly, it might be thought: but these provoked a kind warm smile, with the exclamation: 'They are dears!' They were ...
— The Shaving of Shagpat • George Meredith
... women will thoroughly understand the strange and intimate frame-work of human society, the wail of the pessimist will be soothed and hushed forever: for then will they realize how dependent we poor mortals are upon each other for sorrows or joys: then will it be plain to them that no human life, however obscure, however trifling, is an unfeeling thing, ...
— The Doctor's Daughter • "Vera"
... splendid work, as by means of the FISH DAINTIES (the title of the book) they popularised the use of fish. Now, it is greatly to be regretted that this firm no longer exists, because if ever there was a venture which deserved support, it was surely this. But I am no pessimist in these matters, and verily believe that before long this company, or one similar, will be in full swing again, and that the public will thereby benefit in every conceivable way. As far as Sydney is concerned there ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... staterooms so-called were boxes in which the bunks were shelves spread with patches of filthy bed-clothing, somewhat after the style of a mustard plaster. This criticism must be taken with a little reservation. Dickens was a pessimist and always censorious and as he had been feted and feasted with the fat of the land, he expected that he should have been entertained in kingly quarters on shipboard. But because things did not come up ...
— Marvels of Modern Science • Paul Severing
... bitter about it. She says there never was a country yet where the population was made up of "ladies" and "gentlemen," and she does n't believe there can be; nor that putting a spread eagle on a copper makes a gold dollar of it. She is a pessimist after her own fashion. She thinks all sentiment is dying out of our people. No loyalty for the sovereign, the king-post of the political edifice, she says; no deep attachment between employer and ...
— A Mortal Antipathy • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... is where we are going, if there is any possible way to go. An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist is ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... description of the lady was correct, and, this being so, she supposed that the facts and traits of character which he told her about in other people were also true. She thus adopted the Smithsonian, or fashionable-pessimist view of society in general, and resigned herself to the idea that the world was a very wicked world, as well as a very pleasant world, that the wickedest people were generally the pleasantest, and that ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... mockery means absolute isolation; it is the sign of a thoroughgoing egotism. If we wish to do good to men we must pity and not despise them. We must learn to say of them, not "What fools!" but "What unfortunates!" The pessimist or the nihilist seems to me less cold and icy than the mocking atheist. He reminds me of the somber words ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... theory all worked out and some one comes along and asks you a simple little question that knocks it all in the head." And that is almost the unanimous experience. What you know you have got to qualify if you talk at all. I am getting to be such a pessimist I am not much good in the government ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association, Report of the Proceedings at the Seventh Annual Meeting • Various |
