"Pessimism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... exercise in our thoughts and feelings, the optimism that consists in having one's brain move vigorously through disagreeable facts—organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work—is worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism both, have ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Well, that was just pessimism. Leibowitz would find something, and the case would be over, and he could go back to Washington and rest. In August he was going to have his vacation, anyway, and August wasn't ...
— Out Like a Light • Gordon Randall Garrett
... gentlemanly fashion. But his remarks had not been without a touch of facetiousness in their wilful disgust. And the mere tone of his voice proved that he felt better. To justify his previous black pessimism he had of course been obliged to behave in a certain manner (well known among patients who have been taking themselves too seriously), and Rachel had understood and excused. She would have been ready, indeed, to excuse for worse extravagances than any that could have occurred ...
— The Price of Love • Arnold Bennett
... evocation of these tender nothings, intimate and familiar images of daily life, moved Luce sometimes to tears. They tasted the exquisite small joys of the hearth of the future.... They knew that nothing of that sort would occur—Pierre through the presentiment of his native pessimism—Luce through the clairvoyance of love which understood the practical impossibility of the marriage.... That is why they hasted to enjoy it in their dream. And each concealed from the other the certainty felt that it would not be anything else but a dream. ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... answer would seem the plain one: something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... looked her questioner up and down, with a cool, inhuman curiosity working in her small eyes. So M'selle Elise had thrown him over already? That was sharp work! As for the rest of her news, her pessimism was interested in observing his demeanour under it. Certainly he did not seem to take it gaily; but what else did he expect ...
— The History of David Grieve • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... adventurous. In this prosaic twentieth century the Land of Romance still beckons to eager eyes and gallant hearts. The rutted money-grabber may deny till he is a nerve-racked counting-machine, but youth, even to the end of time, will laugh to scorn his pessimism and venture with elastic heel where danger and mystery ...
— Bucky O'Connor • William MacLeod Raine
... his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair, and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous philosophy ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... said, we are shown a thing absolutely evil, and—what is more dreadful still—this absolute evil is united with supreme intellectual power. Why is the representation tolerable, and why do we not accuse its author either of untruth or of a desperate pessimism? ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... ideals of a Messianic future and the purest, the most humane conception of life, alternate with sublime descriptions of nature and the sweet strains of love-poems, with national songs breathing hope, or trembling with anguish, and with the dull tones of despairing pessimism and the divinely inspired hymns of an exalted theodicy—all blending to form what the reverential love of men has ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... no means certain that Hal Dozier, great trailer though he was, would know that the fugitive was making for the northern mountains. With all these things in mind, in spite of the pessimism of Henry Allister, Andrew felt that he had far more than a fighting chance to break out of the mountain desert and into the comparative safety of the crowded ...
— Way of the Lawless • Max Brand
... no more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not God's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making God Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... right hand, and Wilhelm and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored them. The earnest ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... suffering, as Professor Huxley tells us, are always with us, and even increase in quantity and intensity as evolution advances. The fact had been recognised in remote ages long before theories of evolution had taken their modern form. Pessimism, from the time of the ancient Hindoo philosophers to the time of their disciple, Schopenhauer, has been in no want of evidence to support its melancholy conclusions. It would be idle to waste rhetoric in the attempt to recapitulate ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... to his opinions, did not trouble himself in the least. For the rest, all who knew of the meditated coup of Horrocks were agitated to a degree. All hoped for success, but all agreed in a feeling of pessimism which was more or less the outcome of previous experiences of Retief. Did not they know, only too well, of the traps which had been laid and which had failed to ensnare the daring desperado in ...
— The Story of the Foss River Ranch • Ridgwell Cullum
... "administrative mechanism," what are the peculiar tendencies of a leveling democracy which seeks immediate establishment? Among the maladies which are special with us—feeble birth-rate, political instability, absence of local life, slow industrial and commercial development, despondency and pessimism—can an aptitude for transformation which we do not possess be distinguished in the sense demanded by the new milieu? The knowledge we have of our origins, of our psychology, of our present constitution, of our circumstances, what ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 6 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 2 (of 2) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... severity of judgment should take their place. Young people with strong natures can seldom find the middle course between extremes, and this one, in curbing a desire for power, will fairly crush his whole vigour, while that one, in revolt against the tyranny of love, will become the slave of pessimism. There were days, no doubt, and weeks when Orange found every counsel, a mockery, and every law, a paradox. The strife between the flesh and the spirit went on in his life as it does in all lives, but he was one who ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of scholarship, in spite ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... There are, however, certain mental characteristics which recur with surprising regularity in most of the various phases—dissatisfaction, lack of confidence, a sense of being alone and shut in to oneself, doubt, anxiety, fear, worry, self-depreciation, lack of interest in outside affairs, pessimism, fixed belief in one's powerlessness, along ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... under the cruel deceptions of love, he seemed to lose faith in his idealism; his pessimism, nevertheless, always remained noble, restrained, sympathetic, manifesting itself not in appeals for condolence, but in pitying care for all who were near and dear to him. Yet his lofty prose and poetry, interpenetrated ...
— Cinq Mars, Complete • Alfred de Vigny
... preferring the pantheism of Goethe, or of Renan (without his pessimism), to the anthropomorphic God of the Israelites, or of their theosophic legatees, the Christians, however inconsistent, I still believe in prayer. I should not pray that I may not die 'for want of breath'; nor for rain, while 'the wind was in the wrong quarter.' My prayers would not be like those ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... like his own to his country: 'We Irish are too poetical to be poets; we are a nation of brilliant failures, but we are the greatest talkers since the Greeks.' When dinner was over he read me from the proofs of 'The Decay of Lying' and when he came to the sentence: 'Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy,' I said, 'Why do you change "sad" to "melancholy?"' He replied that he wanted a full sound at ...
— Four Years • William Butler Yeats
... then present mood was inclined toward pessimism. "It doesn't take any nerve to hold up a coach," ...
— Ranson's Folly • Richard Harding Davis
... re-settlement," an item which included the purchase of land and other arrangements for the establishment of suitable British settlers on farms in both colonies. The debate on the vote afforded a significant exhibition of the spirit of mingled pessimism and distrust in which the Liberal Opposition approached every aspect of the South African question. The idea of the Transvaal ever being able to repay this grant-in-aid out of the "hypothetical" development loan appeared ridiculous to Sir William ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... of Dr. Pangloss, and settled to his own satisfaction that this was the worst of all possible worlds, he held all places to be more or less equally vile. So he had followed Niekerk grumblingly down the mountain pass leading to the Low Country, and had been wasting his pessimism on the desert air of the Crocodile River Valley for ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... illness, he'd still got the "bother o' dyin' before him." He was certain we should lose the war, and the rush of the September victories did not affect him. And if we didn't lose it, no matter—prices and wages would still be enough to ruin us. Rachel grew impatient under the constant drench of pessimism. Janet remembered that the man was a delicate man, nearing the sixties, with, as she suspected, but small provision laid up for old age; with an ailing wife; and bearing the marks in body and spirit of years of overwork. She never missed an opportunity ...
— Harvest • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... guru's behest and spread the glad tiding, though it confound once more an incurious generation. Groveling, man knows well; despair is seldom alien; yet these are perversities, no part of man's true lot. The day he wills, he is set on the path to freedom. Too long has he hearkened to the dank pessimism of his "dust-thou-art" counselors, heedless of the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... restlessness manifested itself in a most unusual pessimism. Twice he picked up "float" that showed the clean indigo stain of silver bromyrite in spots the size of a split pea, and cast the piece from him as if it were so much barren limestone, without ever investigating to see where it had come from. Little ...
— Casey Ryan • B. M. Bower
... he reflected; but what were they keeping him for? Not for the sake of hospitality—of that he was grimly certain. There had been no pretence at any friendly feeling on the part of his captors. They had glared hatred at him from the outset, and Phil was firmly convinced, without any undue pessimism, that they had not the smallest intention ...
— The Safety Curtain, and Other Stories • Ethel M. Dell
... There is no pessimism here, for Thomas ['a] Kempis gives the remedies, the only remedies offered to the world since light was created before the sun. He offers no maudlin consolation; to him the sins of the intellect are worse than the sins of the flesh. He ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... appreciation of the efforts which are being made all over this land, by adverse legislation, to weed us out of politics and other public preferments; to push us into a corner to ourselves, in both Church and State—a propaganda which has brought gloom to many of our leaders, producing a pessimism ...
— Masterpieces of Negro Eloquence - The Best Speeches Delivered by the Negro from the days of - Slavery to the Present Time • Various
... this progress has been, at times, painfully slow, it has never once ceased, and during the last century it has moved on with constantly accelerating speed until to-day the human race stands upon the highest point ever reached. I have absolutely no sympathy with that narrow pessimism which is always talking about "the good old times." All in all, there never was a time in the history of the world when man knew so much as to-day; there never was a time when his life was so ministered to by the forces of nature; never a time when his heart was so tender, ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... if she could shake her for her determined pessimism. However, she said nothing, but stood and watched the flames in silence till they seemed to be dying down a little, and then she reluctantly turned from the absorbing sight, and went downstairs to give ...
— Sarah's School Friend • May Baldwin
... physiologist would without doubt explain this anomaly by the coexistence of a nervous lesion, light at first, with a muscular, athletic temperament. Whatever the cause, the effect is undeniable. The skilled and dainty pessimism of De Maupassant was accompanied by a vigor and physique very unusual. His sensations are in turn those of a hunter and of a sailor, who have, as the old French saying expressively puts it, "swift foot, eagle eye," ...
— Selected Writings of Guy de Maupassant • Guy de Maupassant
... a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... all those who belong to worn-out generations, he must have been disgusted with action and the villainies it involves. Just before great catastrophes, or just after, there is an epidemic of black pessimism which freezes delicate souls. Besides, he was ill—a favourable circumstance for a disappointed man if he entertains thoughts of giving up the world. In the fogs of Milan his chest and throat became worse ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... were not in the least affected by this ill- concealed pessimism, for, as he told himself, he had money in his pockets and Matanzas was not many miles away. But when he came to part from Jacket he experienced a genuine disappointment. The boy, strangely enough, was almost indifferent to his leaving; he merely extended a limp and dirty hand, ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... 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 must believe ...
— Bay State Monthly, Vol. I, No. 3, March, 1884 - A Massachusetts Magazine • Various
... In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... "nature"—the germinal constitution, to wit—all that passes from generation to generation, the capital sum without the results of individual usury; then we are freed, at least, from undue pessimism at the thought of the many harmful functions and environments that disfigure our civilization. Many detrimental acquired characters are to be seen all around us, but if they are not transmissible, they need ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... this campaign against our present day institutions, and painfully impressed by the great harm which this disastrous work of calumny, hatred, distrust and pessimism must have upon the progress and tranquillity of us, the Filipinos, I deem it my duty to speak when I am led to think that the limit has been reached by a document which came to my hands. It is no less than ...
— The Legacy of Ignorantism • T.H. Pardo de Tavera
... Barclay, scowling into the mirror. "But then, I knew you would. Your pessimism didn't produce much effect on me. I've heard men talk like that before. And, of course, when a chap gets into the condition you were in, back there, there's no such thing as making him believe he can ever pull out. You talked like an ass, that first ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... human happiness; and the jolly Squires who with their 'dames' kept open house and celebrated Harvest Home and Christmas Festival with all the buoyancy and vigour of a sane and healthful manhood undeteriorated by any sickly taint of morbid pessimism and indifferent inertia, were the beneficent rulers of a merrier rural population than has ever been seen since their day. Squire Vancourt the elder, grandfather of the present heiress of Abbot's Manor, had been a splendid specimen of 'the fine old English ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... sensible book all that time, did not gain a ha'porth of wisdom, and did not raise my moral standard an inch. Was not that disastrous? Moreover, besides being corrupted ourselves, we bring poison into the lives of those surrounding us. It would be all right if, with our pessimism, we renounced life, went to live in a cave, or made haste to die, but, as it is, in obedience to the universal law, we live, feel, love women, ...
— Love and Other Stories • Anton Chekhov
... Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees—I count myself among this tardy company—to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... understand my hobbies as I understand yours. Why can't you let it alone? I hoped that such fun might come out of this Wayne business. Why can't you let it alone? It doesn't really so much matter to you—what's a road or so? For me it's the one joke that may save me from pessimism. Take fewer men and give me an hour's fun. Really and truly, James, if you collected coins or humming-birds, and I could buy one with the price of your road, I would buy it. I collect incidents—those rare, those precious things. ...
— The Napoleon of Notting Hill • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... knowledge respecting him, however, is due in part to the fact that near the close of his life, while he was oscillating in a half-rational condition between Andover and Boston, with an occasional visit to Plymouth, he fell into a fit of pessimism and despair during which he spent two days in obliterating the materials for his biography, by destroying all his letters and manuscripts. He did as much as he could to make impossible any adequate account of his career or any suitable revelation of his character as developed in his correspondence. ...
— James Otis The Pre-Revolutionist • John Clark Ridpath
... 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 of her troubles in advance. At the same time, the father ...
— A Canadian Bankclerk • J. P. Buschlen
... the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... of faith in the virtues of her own party, as well as of the masses. It is no wonder if she fell out of love for awhile with the ideals of romance, with her own art of fiction, and the types of heroism that were her favorite creations. But if the shadow of a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she could view it now as a spiritual malady which she had yet the will and the strength to live down; as years before she had surmounted a similar phase of feeling induced by ...
— Famous Women: George Sand • Bertha Thomas
... whispered Quimbleton, "I was able to make a pleasant impression on the Bishop. One evening I went to call on him. I took the precaution to eat a green persimmon beforehand, which distorted my features into such a malignant contraction of pessimism and misanthropy that I quite won his heart. He accepted an invitation to play croquet with me. That afternoon I prepared the garden with a deluge of champagne. The golden drops sparkled on every rose-petal: the lawn was drenched with it. After playing one round ...
— In the Sweet Dry and Dry • Christopher Morley
... from Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Resartus is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and {454} dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... had not been read and re-read until they have become a common possession of historical students. From a thinker who deemed the time "out of joint," as Tacitus obviously did, and who, had he not possessed great strength of mind and character, might have lapsed into a gloomy pessimism, what noble words are these: "This I regard as history's highest function: to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." The modesty of the Roman ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... think of it, no longer startled by so extraordinary a revelation, this was the second time that Christianity ran the risk of becoming a dualistic religion—a religion, like some of its Asiatic rivals, of pessimism, transcendentally spiritual or cynically base according to the individual believer. Nor is it surprising that such views, identical with those of the transcendental theologians of the fourth century, and equivalent ...
— Renaissance Fancies and Studies - Being a Sequel to Euphorion • Violet Paget (AKA Vernon Lee)
... comes back full and tries to clean out all them nesters," Happy Jack predicted. For once no one tried to combat his pessimism—for that was exactly what every one of ...
— The Flying U's Last Stand • B. M. Bower
... How the Play came to be Written Thomas Tyler Frank Harris Harris "durch Mitleid wissend" "Sidney's Sister: Pembroke's Mother" Shakespear's Social Standing This Side Idolatry Shakespear's Pessimism Gaiety of Genius Jupiter and Semele The Idol of the Bardolaters Shakespear's alleged Sycophancy and Perversion Shakespear and Democracy Shakespear and the British Public The ...
— Dark Lady of the Sonnets • George Bernard Shaw
... everything home to yourselves. You try to deduct conclusions from your own lives which men like Schopenhauer have scanned the centuries for. The natural course of your life could hardly have provided you with the pessimism with which—I hope you will pardon my remark, my dear—you have treated me several times in the past few months. Chamfort and Schopenhauer did that. But these are not subjects a man ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... desire for money, no faltering of aspiration, no pandering of his gift and genius to please the world, no surrender of art for the sake of fame or filthy lucre, no falseness to his ideal, no base pessimism, no slavery to science yet no boastful ignorance of its good, no morbid naturalism, no devotion to the false forms of beauty, no despair of man, no retreat from men into a world of sickly or vain beauty, no abandonment of the great ideas ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... of undue pessimism, let me cite as a witness one who, of all men, is probably best equipped to express an opinion upon the moral state of the world. I refer to the venerable head of that religious organization[4] which, with its trained representatives in every part of the world, ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... and dinner announced as Joicey spoke, and the conversation took another turn. Many things were bothering Joicey—the financial year generally, a big commercial failure, the outlook for the rice crop—and as the meal wore on he grew more dreary, and a pessimism that is part of some men's minds ...
— The Pointing Man - A Burmese Mystery • Marjorie Douie
... Byronic or Wertherian disease which became so familiar some hundred years ago. On the other hand, Burton being a practical, and, on the whole, very healthy Englishman, it came something short of "The Melencolia that transcends all wit," the incurable pessimism and quiet despair which have been thought to be figured or prefigured in Durer's famous print. Yet it approaches, and that not distantly, to this latter. It is the Vanity of Vanities of a man who has gone, in thought ...
— A History of English Literature - Elizabethan Literature • George Saintsbury
... about A.D. 90 has been shown above. This step he may have taken to forward his promotion in the army and afterwards in the procuratorial service. His failure in this direction may have led to his pessimism. His friendship with Martial (whom, however, he does not mention) is shown by Mart. vii. 24 (cf. ...
— The Student's Companion to Latin Authors • George Middleton
... cried out, in haste but still in anguish: "Alas! All things are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!" The roads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to get to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against great odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains, disappointments, temptations, failures, wounds, ending ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... of any moral distinction between truth and falsehood, ... a thorough-going hack-demagogue, coarse, vulgar, and impudent, with a vein of low humor exactly suited to the rabble of a popular city and equally so to the taste of the present House of Representatives." Other similar bits of that pessimism and belief in the deterioration of the times, so common in old men, occasionally appear. In August, 1835, he thinks that "the signs of the times are portentous. All the tendencies of legislation are to the removal of restrictions from the vicious and the guilty, ...
— John Quincy Adams - American Statesmen Series • John. T. Morse
... topping all; of twinkling, fluent, tossing leaves and of the gray under side of elongated, straining leaves; a sense of pert bird-noises, and of a longer shadow than usual slanting before him, and a sense of youth and well-being everywhere. Certainly it was not a morning wherein pessimism ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1919 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... world in full retreat from the world of Alfred and Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem—from this and the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the Bastille—has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly ill-founded Christian pessimism. To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem. He sees men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order to ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... Uncle Chris breezily. "Happiness, my dear, happiness! Wedding bells and—and all that sort of thing!" He straddled the hearth-rug manfully, and swelled his chest out. He would permit no pessimism on this occasion of rejoicing. "You don't suppose that the fact of your having lost your money—that is to say—er—of my having lost your money—will affect a splendid young fellow like Derek Underhill? I know him better than to think that! ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... appears to believe that a peaceful solution of the Austro-Servian incident is not only possible but even probable. Official circles, on the contrary, for some time past, have displayed with more or less sincerity positive pessimism. ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... embroidered conceit, but one of those lyrics of pure nature music, of which the Renaissance poets were so lavish, touched with the fire of Spring, with the light of hope, bird-notes untroubled by doubt, unconscious of pessimism, which are therefore all the more charming for us who dwell amid sunsets of intense colouring, who can see nothing but the hectic splendours of autumn. For the melancholy nightingale the poet has surprise ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain the essential qualities ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... child becomes the spoilt child. The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into pessimism; or else, what is ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... Browning accepts life as it is, and believes it good, piecing out his conception of the goodness of life by drawing without limit upon his hopes of the other world. With the exception of a few poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life, in The Tempest and The Winter's ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... Lynn, who was subject to fits of pessimism, "you'll never spend it. Anna will never have finished washing up. Miss Bibby will never have finished writing to mamma. We'll never get up to the shops. We'll have to stop shut up ...
— In the Mist of the Mountains • Ethel Turner
... riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily. This is better treatment than The Lily and the Bee ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... Edmond de Goncourt should have ended by disliking the form of the novel, which he came to regard as an exhausted convention. His pessimism was universal. Art was dying, literature was perishing daily. The almost universal acceptance of Ibsen and of Tolstoi was in itself a convincing symptom of degeneration, if the vogue of the latter writer were not indeed the result of a cosmopolitan plot against the native ...
— Rene Mauperin • Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt
... interpretation of it is another. A society has to be old before it becomes critical, and it has to become critical before it can take pleasure in the reproduction of its incongruities by an instrument as impertinent as the indefatigable crayon. Irony, scepticism, pessimism are, in any particular soil, plants of gradual growth, and it is in the art of caricature that they flower most aggressively. Furthermore they must be watered by education—I mean by the education of the eye and hand—all of which things take time. The soil must be ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... fallen a little when he learned that Horace had not returned, still looked brighter than before. While Sidney Meeks never let him have the last word, yet he was much better than Sylvia as a safety-valve for pessimism. Meeks was as pessimistic in his way as Henry, although he handled his pessimism, as he did everything else, with diplomacy, and the other man had a secret conviction that when he seemed to be on the opposite side yet he was in reality pulling ...
— The Shoulders of Atlas - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... easy to sneer away statements like these. It is easy to laugh them off as "mere pessimism," and to talk of persons with "green spectacles" and "disordered livers." We have learned to know the glad ring of the optimist's patriotic voice. If we all believed this voice, we should all believe that America is the ideal polity of ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... debates. And Mr. Darrow's debates have been always worth $1, $2 and even $5—for various reasons. It is worth at least $5 to observe at first hand what a cheering and invigorating effect Mr. Darrow's pessimism has had upon Mr. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... uniform is the world." [Footnote: xi. I. The cyclical theory was curiously revived in the nineteenth; century by Nietzsche, and it is interesting to note his avowal that it took him a long time to overcome the feeling of pessimism ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... German. He, too, was a philosopher, clothed with ample power, and blest with opportunity. But he did evil in his life, and then the heart lost its faith, and hope utterly perished. The more he loved pleasure and pursued self, the more cynical and bitter he became. Pessimism set a cold, hard stamp upon his face, and marred his beauty. Cynicism lies like a black mark across his pages. At last, in his bitterness, the philosopher tells us the whole universe is a mirage, and that yonder summer-making sun is a bubble that repeats its iridescent tints ...
— The World's Great Sermons, Volume 10 (of 10) • Various
... Fetherel. "It isn't as long as one of his sermons—won't take me five minutes to read. Here, listen to this, ladies and gentlemen: 'In this age of festering pessimism and decadent depravity, it is no surprise to the nauseated reviewer to open one more volume saturated with the fetid emanations ...
— The Descent of Man and Other Stories • Edith Wharton
... of massing facts as to physical defects of school children should not be to cause alarm, but to stimulate remedial and preventive measures, to invoke congratulations and aggressive optimism, not doleful pessimism and palliative measures ...
— Civics and Health • William H. Allen
... which became familiar to hundreds of thousands of troops on their way up to Palestine in 1917-1918. Even the cemetery was only wired off during our occupation, and one remembers being somewhat ribald at the pessimism of the authorities who provided sufficient consecrated ground to contain the bodies of all the troops then garrisoning the place. As usual the authorities scored ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... creates an abstraction and then shudders at a reality which does not answer to it. Now statesmen who have set out to deal with actual life must deal with actual people. They cannot afford an inclusive pessimism about mankind. Let them have the consistency and good sense to cease bothering about men if men's desires seem intrinsically evil. Moral judgment about the ultimate quality of character is dangerous to a politician. ...
— A Preface to Politics • Walter Lippmann
... difference to a man of this age whether or not he believes in the personal God and the Divine Christ. If he really believes, it makes all the difference between spiritual strength and spiritual weakness, between optimism and pessimism. I will not admit that it makes no difference to a learned scholar or a simple labourer to-day whether he accepts or ignores the doctrine of the atonement, the doctrine of personal immortality. If he knows that Christ died for him, that there is a future beyond the grave, it ...
— Joy & Power • Henry van Dyke
... lie to his growling complaints and pessimism, he laughed with a bellowing cachinnation that prompted the burros, now rested, to look at him with long gray ears thrust forward curiously, and wonder ...
— The Plunderer • Roy Norton
... as a civilization, we are less sure of where we are going, where we want to go, how and for what we wish to live, than at any intelligent period of which we have full record. This is not pessimism. It is merely a fact, which is dependent upon our failure to digest the problems that democracy, machinery, feminism, and the destruction of our working dogmas by scientific discovery, have presented to ...
— Definitions • Henry Seidel Canby
... general rule only within the reach of the few, of the privileged classes and those more or less dependent on their favour, with whom such ideals as those voiced by Winstanley would naturally meet with but scant consideration. Moreover, though we may be accused of pessimism or cynicism for saying so, it seems to us that the main reason why teachings such as Winstanley's must necessarily remain specially unpalatable and unwelcome so long as social and political privileges are allowed to continue, is that they are too simple and direct, and the path ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... that something could be done to avert that doom. But whatever his mood, he went on working and scheming furiously. Maybe it was the desperate need to keep himself occupied that drove him, or perhaps it was the pleading he saw in the eyes around him. In the end, determination conquered his pessimism. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... endure the ills they had, than be nipped in the upper passage. He, also, who first spoke the ancient proverb, Let sleeping dogs lie, did no more than voice the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented the saying that the world is going to the bow-wows, lodged his deplorable pessimism ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... Sophonisba was Chetwood, whose "General History of the Stage" gives us many a charming glimpse of dead and gone actors. Dead and gone? Nay, rather let it be said that they still live in the ever fresh and graphic pages of contemporary critics, and thus refute the gentle pessimism of Mr. Henley when he ...
— The Palmy Days of Nance Oldfield • Edward Robins
... achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wistfully back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young' and could express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection. The exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by his own statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed as largely the expression, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... union of all Christian Churches; (13) the impossibility of such union ever becoming permanent; (14) the value of Holy Scripture in daily life; (15) his firm belief in the achievement of England's greatness by means of the open Bible; (16) the note of pessimism in modern life; (17) the necessity for the Church's combating modern pessimism; (18) the Church's position as a purveyor of healthy literature for the young; (19) his reluctance to take up any more of their valuable ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... much that remained for a long time inexplicable in her father's attitude towards life. He seemed to regret nothing, not even the death of his elder son, nor his estrangement from Vickers, and he had little of the old man's pessimism. There were certain modern manifestations that she knew he disliked; but he seemed to have a fine tolerance even for them, as being of no special concern to him. He had lived his life, such as it was, without swerving, without doubts or hesitations, which beset the younger generation, and now ...
— Together • Robert Herrick (1868-1938)
... enlightened, 241. Metaphysical and moral idealism, 242. The inherent difficulty in metaphysical idealism, 242. The swing from formalism to materialism. Pessimism, other-worldliness, mysticism, panlogism and aesthetic idealism, 243. Aesthetic idealism falsifies experience and ...
— The Moral Economy • Ralph Barton Perry
... doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with the desperation of Carlyle's ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... enthusiasm, and is none the less terrible for being without experience to justify it,—that melancholy we are too apt to look back upon with cynical jeers and laughter in middle age,—is more potent than we dare to think, and it was in no mere pose of youthful pessimism that Randolph Trent now contemplated suicide. Such scraps of philosophy as his education had given him pointed to that one conclusion. And it was the only refuge that pride—real or false—offered him from the one supreme terror ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... of minds. It was very well for me to spin sonorous generalities, but I had never till now dreamed of being so vulgar as to translate them into practice. I had always detested the meddlesome alarmist, who veils ignorance under noisiness, and for ever wails his chant of lugubrious pessimism. To be thrown with Davies was to receive a shock of enlightenment; for here, at least, was a specimen of the breed who exacted respect. It is true he made use of the usual jargon, interlarding his stammering sentences (sometimes, when ...
— Riddle of the Sands • Erskine Childers
... was unsympathetic; brought face to face with suffering, she blossomed with every impulsive tenderness, but her experiences had confirmed her in pessimism, and every fresh tragedy testified to the soundness of her faith. Her pride at diagnosing people's ills and pronouncing their death-sentences was almost professional. And she had an irritating way of making ...
— The Blood Red Dawn • Charles Caldwell Dobie
... language. "Thank God" was local, and might lend itself to an interpretation that could not be approved. But the Rector imported something into the words that was a protection, something that was of the pulpit, that held a solemnity in its pessimism. ...
— Waysiders • Seumas O'Kelly
... estimate of the comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be derived—from ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... of Caesar, I can not believe, no matter what they say, in his near return. In spite of my pessimism, we have not come to that! However, if one consulted the God called Universal Suffrage, who knows?...Ah! we ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... box and out of sight of its occupant that she paused. Her thoughts were in a turmoil. His presence there, after his deliberate assurance to her that he had no intention of coming, his calm and unnoticing regard of her and every one else, seemed to confirm in every way the wave of pessimism which she as well as Nigel was experiencing. She had passed Immelan in the entrance, and there was something ominously disturbing in his cool, triumphant smile. She pictured to herself the agreement signed, some nameless terror already launched. She remembered that Nigel had complained ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... very glad to hear you say so," he said, smiling. "Do you know that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for it found its ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... eternal roads? The religious question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms—nay, in the ignoblest form of a fashion—have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which prevails. For those who follow the one ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... circumstances upon strange voyages which, indeed, he would have been ashamed to describe. In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that this spirit was the most valuable possession he had; he ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... had disappeared in the psychic! Cecil Grimshaw's melancholy and pessimism, his love of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished! Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian. Cecil Grimshaw never had been. Grimshaw had revolted against ugliness as a dilettante objects to the mediocre in art. Pierre Pilleux was conscious of social ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... anything of the kind. The writer whom he did say was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such a candle as by God's grace ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... perfectum bonum est in hoc mundo, et quod est, valde est exiguum. This speculation is clearly a development of that which the Iranian cosmology has to tell about the battles between Ahura-Mazda and Angro-Mainyu (Ormuzd and Ahriman). The Iranian optimism has been replaced here by a strong pessimism. This material world is no longer, as in Zoroastrianism, essentially a creation of the good God, but the powers of evil have created it with the aid of some stolen portions of light. This is practically the transference ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... his head, and after sitting for some time in silence, went ashore with the cook and drank himself into a state of hopeless pessimism. In this condition he forgave everybody, and feeling very low, made his will by the simple process of giving his knife to Dick and two and sevenpence to Henry. The trouble he had in revoking it next morning furnished a striking illustration ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... endless falsities of a Parisian woman of innocent Madonna-like beauty. It was dramatized and played at the Vaudeville in 1889, but without much success. 'Le Disciple' is an elaborate attempt to prove that present scientific theories tend to corrupt manners and to encourage pessimism. In 'Cosmopolis,' a study of foreign life in Italy, Bourget shows that the same passions dominate men, whatever ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... cloudscape, landscape, season, foison, man and beast of the field, with the same wistfulness which women who have known sorrow exhibit for children who have not. Reading him again, however, last night, after the long interval of fever and unrest which the war has enforced, I found his pessimism troublesome. Sussex, so far as I know it, is not so degenerate as he seems to have found it; and surely since the war began he must have changed his mind. It is hard to remember 1898, or 1913 for that matter, but I happen to know ...
— In a Green Shade - A Country Commentary • Maurice Hewlett
... wean him from pessimism and rebuild within him a healthy appetite for life. If she did more than that, she did not know it then; for Ward Warren had learned, along with other hard lessons, the art of keeping his thoughts locked safely away, and of using his face as a mask to hide even the doorway to his ...
— The Ranch at the Wolverine • B. M. Bower
... had made this lucky strike, told in simple words of his long and solitary quest, when ill-luck had risen with him at the dawn and misfortune had stalked beside him as he drifted and drank from camp to camp, while the gloom of a settled pessimism soured him, and men began to shun him because of the evil that seemed ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... generation. Through a burning sea of trouble, of intellectual disquiet and mental agony, he had emerged strengthened at every point. Love had fulfilled upon him its great office. He was humanized. The impersonality, which is the student's bane, which deepens into misanthropy, cynicism, and pessimism, yielded before it. The voices of his own children became dearer to him than the written thoughts of dead men. It was the reassertion of nature, and it was well for him. So was he saved, so was his genius unfettered from the cloying weight of too much abstract thought, ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... Rome is destined to dissipate itself in an incurable corruption; whence we see, then in Rome, as to-day in France, wealth, power, culture, glory, draw in their train—grim but inseparable comrade!—a pessimism that times poorer, cruder, more troubled, had not known. In the very moment in which the empire was ordering itself, civil wars ended; in that solemn Pax Romana which was to have endured so many ages, in the very moment in ...
— Characters and events of Roman History • Guglielmo Ferrero
... professed pessimism she could not help feeling a bit more hopeful, even sharing a bit of her lodger's confidence. And so when Primmie, in tears, came again that afternoon to beg to be retained in service, Martha consented ...
— Galusha the Magnificent • Joseph C. Lincoln
... Possibly I thought the trade was a bad one for a second son who must support himself. It is more probable that I instinctively felt that although it was so great a source of joy to me, poetry was not my true vocation. Perhaps, also, I had already begun to note the voice of pessimism raised by the poets of the 'seventies, and to feel that they did not believe in themselves. I distinctly remember that Tennyson's "Is there no hope for modern rhyme?" was often on my lips and in my mind. His ...
— The Adventure of Living • John St. Loe Strachey
... view, might be unfortunate. Duke had a forgiving disposition, but he also possessed a melancholy wisdom. In the company of either Penrod or Sam, alone, affection often caused him to linger, albeit with a little pessimism, but when he saw them together, he invariably withdrew in as unobtrusive a ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... wits—writers, illustrators, actors, newspaper men, with a smattering of Wall Street brokers seeking a little mild diversion as we are, and foreigners to whom this place has a sentimental interest because it reminds them of home. Sophisticated children, most of them, optimists with moments of hideous pessimism, enthusiasts at various stages of Parnassus, the peak of which is lighted with a huge dollar sign. A friendly, kindly lot, hard-working and temperamental, with some brilliance and a rather high level of cleverness—slaves of the magazine, probably, and therefore ...
— Who Cares? • Cosmo Hamilton
... Coppinger's hopes and fears as to his prospects of becoming a Member of Parliament varied no more than was suitable in the possessor of the artistic temperament, but Barty, his agent in chief, maintained an attitude of unbroken pessimism. That whisper of the secret and late-declared antagonism of the Church had reached him, and in the secure seclusion of his own office he inveighed against clerical interference with all the fierceness of a dog chained in his kennel, who knows that his ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... him, and it was one of his good days, and he didn't get bumped on the turn, and the boy rode him just right, and he could stay in front of the favourite, he might win. Pressed further, a note of pessimism developed in the patriarch's conversation; he became the bearded embodiment of reasonable doubt. Curry's remarks, rapidly circulating in the betting ring, may have made it possible for Curry's betting ...
— Old Man Curry - Race Track Stories • Charles E. (Charles Emmett) Van Loan
... ever, and is evidently disposed to look upon another's personality as a marionette of which he pulls the strings. In this presumptuousness we speedily discern a degree of egoism and, behind this latter, something less spontaneous and more bitter, the beginnings of a curious pessimism which becomes the more pronounced as the laugher more closely analyses ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... assemblies, whether fanatical, visionary, or incendiary, of all that congregated to preach against evils that afflicted others, not them, and to propose remedies to aggravate the disease which they pretended to cure." Calhoun's pessimism was clearer eyed. The great nullifier perceived at once the insuppressible nature of the Abolition movement and early predicted that the spirit then abroad in the North would not "die away of itself without a shock or convulsion." Yes, it was as he had prophesied, the anti-slavery reform ...
— William Lloyd Garrison - The Abolitionist • Archibald H. Grimke |
