"Optimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... Petersburg, sat in the old fashion by the stove and talked of public affairs, especially the stage into which the war had now come. The heat of the room felt grateful, as a winter night was falling outside, and in the society of his friends Prescott found himself becoming more of an optimist than he had been for some days. Cheerfulness is riveted in such a physical base as youth and strength, and Prescott was no exception. He could even smile behind his hand when he saw General Wood draw forth the infallible bowie-knife, pull a piece of pine from a rickety ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... An optimist is merely an ex-pessimist with his pockets full of money, his digestion in good condition and his wife ...
— A Guide to Men - Being Encore Reflections of a Bachelor Girl • Helen Rowland
... view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the sober ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... external suggestion. Devoid of stamina, such folk become mere units in a mob. "The habit of crowd-making is daily becoming a more serious menace to civilization," writes Everett Dean Martin. "Our society is becoming a veritable babel of gibbering crowds."(3) It would be only the incorrigible optimist who refused to see the integral relation between this phenomenon and the indiscriminate breeding by which we recruit ...
— The Pivot of Civilization • Margaret Sanger
... Smith. His odd ways, his conversation, and his extreme solicitude for his clothes amused her. She found his outlook on life refreshing. Smith was an optimist. Whatever cataclysm might occur, he never doubted for a moment that he would be comfortably on the summit of the debris when all was over. He amazed Betty with his stories of his reportorial adventures. He told them for the most part as humorous stories at his own expense, but the ...
— The Prince and Betty - (American edition) • P. G. Wodehouse
... views of flood or fire slightly lacking in reality. But really this romantic view of such inconveniences is quite as practical as the other. The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling. Real pain, as in the case of ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... dampened. But after leaving her I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week. Thus heartened ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... worth noting how this optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles, which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as a field ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... acts of kindness and mock at words of affection. I know this though I have seen but little of the world. I suppose I have something harsher in my nature than you have, something which every now and then tells me dreary secrets about my race, and I cannot believe the voice of the Optimist, charm he never so wisely. On the other hand, I feel forced to listen when a Thackeray speaks. I know truth is delivering her oracles by ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... Trost, who is no optimist as to the state of the universe hitherto, but is confident that at some future period within the duration of the solar system, ours will be the best of all possible worlds—a hope which I always honour as a sign of beneficent qualities—my friend Trost always tries to ...
— Impressions of Theophrastus Such • George Eliot
... the disappointment struck Johnnie silent. Pros Passmore was an optimist, one who never used a strong word to express sorrow or dismay, but he came out of a brown study in which he had muttered, "Blaylock. No, Harp wouldn't do. Culp's. Sally Ann's not to be trusted. What about the Venable boys? No good"—to say with a distressed drawing ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... Wilbur. "Miss Brown, you're an optimist. But that's because you've never seen him ride. I consider it a good day's work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following and ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... envelope, which would convince the greatest pessimist that Germany and Austria were outnumbered by at least three to one. But on this particular morning, people were too stunned for calculations. The incredible had happened. The long-discussed war—the nightmare of the nervous, the derision of the optimist—had actually materialised. The happy-go-luck years of peace and plenty had suddenly come to an end. Black ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... I knew long since, a white-haired man, Pithy of speech, and merry when he would; A genial optimist, who daily drew From what he saw his quaint moralities. Kindly he held communion, though so old, With me a dreaming boy, and taught me much That books tell not, ...
— Poems • William Cullen Bryant
... optimist is," says Dugald Stewart, "that all events are ordered for the best; and that evils which we suffer are parts of a great system conducted by almighty power under the direction of infinite wisdom and goodness." Leibnitz, who is unquestionably ...
— A Theodicy, or, Vindication of the Divine Glory • Albert Taylor Bledsoe
... most cheerful and constant companion in nature. He is a bringer of good tidings—a philosopher who insists that we are masters of our fate and that winter is just the time when there is some sense in being an optimist. Anybody, he seems to say, can be an optimist when the days are long and the air is warm and worms are plentiful; but it is just when things are looking a little black and the other fellows begin to grouse that ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... Optimist and perhaps the only prophet of Democracy one can read without shame. The magical beauty of his style at its best has not even yet received complete justice. He has the power of restoring us to courage and joy even under circumstances of aggravated gloom. He ...
— One Hundred Best Books • John Cowper Powys
... laugh mildly at Sir Raffle's jokes. A little man, hardly more than five feet high, with small but honest-looking eyes, and close-cut hair, was standing behind the arm-chair, rubbing his hands together, and longing for the departure of Sir Raffle, in order that he might sit down. This was Mr Optimist, the new chairman, in praise of whose appointment the Daily Jupiter had been so loud, declaring that the present Minister was showing himself superior to all Ministers who had ever gone before him, in giving promotion ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... 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 I presume him to be honest; but I ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... of such open and avowed cynicism that he may have been, for all I know, a kindly optimist at heart; some say, however, that he had really talked himself into being what he seemed. I only know that his talk, the first day I saw him, was of such a sort that if he was half as bad, he would have been ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... fluently and he was familiar with the foreign trade field. With the outbreak of war he did not lose his head and try to get business indiscriminately. Instead, he made a careful survey of the field; he did not listen to the optimist who said it would be a short war: his instinct told him, on the contrary, that it would be a long one. "What will France need more than anything ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... sat on the sandy shore near Luderitzbucht and watched the setting sun turn the broad ocean into molten gold, he was little troubled by the fact that his last mark had been spent an hour or two back for a very belated and necessary breakfast, and that he was now absolutely penniless. Always an optimist, Dick easily outdid the immortal Micawber in his faith in something turning up just when things looked their blackest, and he had literally no thought for the morrow, until his hand, mechanically groping in his pocket ...
— A Rip Van Winkle Of The Kalahari - Seven Tales of South-West Africa • Frederick Cornell
... comptroller-general, Herault de Sechelles, as well as the king and Madame de Pompadour, then and for a long while the reigning favorite, gave so favorable a reception to the hero of India that Dupleix, always an optimist, conceived fresh hopes. "I shall regain my property here," he would say, "and India will recover in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... drew him out with sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... their spirits up in his accustomed cheery way. One could easily see that he belonged to the optimist family, and never looked on the gloomy ...
— The Outdoor Chums - The First Tour of the Rod, Gun and Camera Club • Captain Quincy Allen
... which the vanished splendour of the mountains seemed to make a mystic answering. He was a romantic—some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he had had a year of unceasing and strenuous work, with no time to himself; and it had suddenly ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging in it for abstractions, and asking fundamental questions about the origin of society, and why one man should be born rich and another poor. Burke was no prating optimist: it was his very knowledge how much could be said against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy from so-called Liberal opinions. ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... a host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... "Madame Integrale" has displayed throughout her political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It determines as to whether it is a life of power or of ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... had stopped and he anticipated adventure. The idea of getting across the river in a goufa flashed across his mind, but a glance at the foaming, tearing water was sufficient deterrent even to an optimist like Brown. It might be done in daylight, but at night ...
— A Dweller in Mesopotamia - Being the Adventures of an Official Artist in the Garden of Eden • Donald Maxwell
... that Divinity is everywhere may easily make of one an optimist of the sentimental type that refuses to speak ill of anything. Emerson's drastic perception of differences kept him at the opposite pole from this weakness. After you have seen men a few times, he could ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... visible in the calm sky above, so the events which will befall an individual are marked upon the delicate spiritual barometer which forms a part of his being, and can be read with unerring precision by the clear and practiced eye of the optimist. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... forcing it open with a bright little tool. He would get a new key for it in Glasgow on the morrow. He cursed his luck and Lancaster. It would have gone hard indeed with Lancaster but for the existence of Doris. But Bullard was an optimist in his way. He was far from being beaten. Before the train was twenty miles on its journey his head was on the pillow; two minutes later the busy, plotting brain was at rest—recovering energy and ...
— Till the Clock Stops • John Joy Bell
... it as a dividing line between them. He probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject. Hawthorne's superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as all reformers do, to the opposite ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... was a certain doctor who was such an inveterate optimist that he could have given lessons even to Louis Stevenson himself. She says of him: "This doctor has bought a piece of land here upon which he expects to build a house and settle down when he retires from practice. How ...
— The Life of Mrs. Robert Louis Stevenson • Nellie Van de Grift Sanchez
... in the renowned medical school of this city, and he could not therefore be much in want of society. With so many supposed comforts around him—with so many visions of wealth and splendour—one thing alone disturbed the peace of the poor optimist, and would indeed have confounded most bons vivants. "He was curious," he said, "in his table, choice in his selection of cooks, had every day a dinner of three regular courses and a dessert; and yet, somehow or other, everything he eat tasted of porridge." This dilemma ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... pathos—as in the hopeless misery of Charles, invalided, with only eighteen shillings, out of the army—"Ravenshoe" will always deserve to be read. It is the work of a writer who was not ashamed to avow himself an "optimist." ...
— The World's Greatest Books, Volume V. • Arthur Mee and J.A. Hammerton, Eds.
... Gabriel showed himself an optimist. He knew that his illness had no remedy; still, that quiet life free from all emotions, and his brother's care, feeding him at all hours, like a bird and almost by force, had arrested the decay of his health. The course of the illness was ...
— The Shadow of the Cathedral • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... and more serious age. The only reality to him in heaven and on earth was force: his one idea in philosophy was coercion. Human nature to him was an embodiment of brute violence ever in need of violent restraint. Rousseau, an optimist, saw nothing but good in man's original nature: to the pessimist mind of Hobbes all was evil there. Neither of them saw any natural adaptation to social life in the human constitution. To live in society was, in both their views, an artificial arrangement, an ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... tragedy has its compensations for some one. The pitiable arrival of Mr Levinski at "The Duke's Head," unrecognized and with his fur coat slightly ruffled, might make a sceptic of the most devout optimist, and yet Eustace Merrowby can never look back upon that evening without a sigh of thankfulness; for to him it was the beginning of his career. The story has often been told since—in about a dozen weekly papers, ...
— The Holiday Round • A. A. Milne
... them, and here as elsewhere there are considerably more good than bad, while already a certain society takes to itself the credit of the flourishing Fairmead colony. Harry, however, says that undeserved prosperity has made me an optimist. But the reader will wonder how I, Ralph Lorimer, who landed in Canada with one hundred pounds' capital, became owner of Fairmead and married Grace, only daughter and heiress of Colonel Carrington. Well, ...
— Lorimer of the Northwest • Harold Bindloss
... he said. "That 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
... an optimist than he is, I guess," laughed Bob. "He's heard a lot of things that have made ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... keep Mark Twain cheerful, to look pleasant himself, and to show how they were steadily getting rich because orders were pouring in, though a cloud that resembled bankruptcy loomed always a little higher upon the horizon. If Hall had not been young and an optimist, he would have been frightened out of his boots early in the game. As it was, he made a brave steady fight, kept as cheerful and stiff an upper lip as possible, always hoping that something would happen—some grand sale of his other books, some unexpected inflow from the ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... the Owl. 'The kingfisher says so. The kingfisher is an optimist, and he told me I thought it was clever to be cynical; but that was when we had a few words one day. It is from living in a belfry, doubtless, that I have contracted a habit of looking at things on the dark side; but when one has made allowance for the belfry, ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... was of a cheerful disposition that naturally inclined to seek out the good in every situation. He was a genuine optimist. Thus, after tramping the three miles from home to begin the day's work on the ditch, he discovered that he had been careless, and explained ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... of this "optimist failure," "Brichanteau Actor," reminds one of Don Quixote, while his consummate good nature is almost equal to Sir Roger de Coverley's. The clever French author has made his actor tell for the most part his own story, ...
— The Nabob, Vol. 2 (of 2) • Alphonse Daudet
... bad opinion of the Forces that evolved him. By the way, I met that terrible reformer and socialist Aubrey Leigh at the Embassy the other day—the man who is making such a sensation in England with his 'Addresses to the People.' He is quite an optimist, do you know? He believes in ...
— The Master-Christian • Marie Corelli
... not as much of an optimist as his reply would seem to indicate. It was his habit to hold bad news in reserve as long as possible, doubtless for the satisfaction it gave him to dribble it out sparingly. He had found it to his advantage ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... his daughter, but in so many leading men of that time, the eccentricities of the man whom the world called unpractical and visionary must be forgotten, so as to get a glimpse of the Alcott who was the intimate friend of Emerson—a genius, a philosopher, an optimist, in spite of failure and in spite of opposition. Therefore it seems best to give some extracts from his own writings first that will reveal the tenor of his mind and the largeness of his heart and intellect, in order that the poems of the daughter may be more fully understood. ...
— Three Unpublished Poems • Louisa M. Alcott
... methods of manufacture and transportation. Those who have given most attention to the advances of psychology during the past two decades are confident that by the proper application of psychology the efficiency of men is to be increased beyond the idle dream of the optimist of the past. Since by a study of habits the efficiency of men in fundamental occupations has been increased from forty to four hundred per cent, it is hard to prophesy what results are to be secured from more ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... through over thirty years avoid even a slanting glance at the events which preoccupied Mr. Punch in his cartoons. There is evidence that there was more than the policy of the Paper in this. Du Maurier was an optimist. An optimist is a man who thinks that everything is going right when it is going wrong. It requires an effort of the imagination to recall and picture the fact that in the first hour of Du Maurier's mere amusement Ruskin was adding his lachrymation to Carlyle's over a society ...
— George Du Maurier, the Satirist of the Victorians • T. Martin Wood
... went to see Krestinsky, the Commissar of Finance, the curious little optimist whose report on the Extraordinary Tax I had heard at the last meeting of the Executive Committee. I found him in the Ilyinka street, in the Chinese town. I began by telling him that I did not believe that they meant ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... concerning those objects—to seize upon things, opportunities, persons, ideas, and facts tending to promote the objects thought of. The man who is looking for facts to prove certain theories, invariably finds them, and is also quite likely to overlook facts tending to disprove his theory. The Optimist and the Pessimist passing along the same streets, each sees thousands of examples tending to fit in with his idea. As Kay says: "When one is engaged in seeking for a thing, if he keep the image of it clearly before the mind, he will be very likely to find ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... "The optimist notion, therefore, that Nature is an all-wise designer, in whose work order, system, wisdom, and beauty are prominent, does not fare well when placed under ...
— The Crack of Doom • Robert Cromie
... afternoon words when he helped her out of the way of Champion were not in accordance with his words to-night, and that the dimly-realized kiss during her faintness was no imaginary one. But in the blissful circumstances of having Bob at hand again she took optimist views, and persuaded herself that John would soon begin to see her in the light ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... you're disgusted, Chet. But be an optimist. I might 'a' busted you high and wide with that quirt instead of giving you a nice little easy tap that just did the business. There's no manner of use being regretful over past ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... turning over an idea in my head, and I felt that the moment had now come to broach it. Yet I was a little chary of doing so. John, I knew, had a horror of any kind of publicity, and was an easygoing optimist, who preferred never to meet trouble half-way. It might be difficult to convince him of the soundness of my plan. Lawrence, on the other hand, being less conventional, and having more imagination, I felt I might count upon as an ally. ...
— The Mysterious Affair at Styles • Agatha Christie
... Being an optimist has compensations. Indeed, it would need to have, for no virtue has ever landed any one in more damnable scrapes than optimism has landed me. But before the crash comes it does help ...
— The Man From the Clouds • J. Storer Clouston
... endurance to a man of spirit, that were involved by the visitations of "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, fortitude and endurance are something of a difficulty for a gentleman unused to the exercise of either of these fine ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... am an incorrigible optimist! and I truly believe that the world is advancing in every way and that we are already in the dawn of a new era of the understanding, and the exploitation for our benefit of the great forces of nature. But we of the majority of non-scientists, ...
— Three Things • Elinor Glyn
... Independence; and in a yet greater degree to the vast material prosperity and growth of population in England and her colonies and in America. It is also to be ascribed in a measure to the greater study of the philosophy of history. The optimist temperament of some great writers has assisted the creation of it, while the opposite character has led a few to regard the future of the world as dark. The 'spectator of all time and of all existence' sees more of 'the increasing purpose which through the ages ...
— The Republic • Plato
... 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
... in a strange land, and that the letters of so valued a friend as yourself would be to me a source of peculiar pleasure. I never had any heart for this mission, and I know that I shall never enjoy it. Still, I am an optimist in my philosophy, and shall endeavor to make my sojourn here as useful to my country and as agreeable to myself ...
— Perley's Reminiscences, Vol. 1-2 - of Sixty Years in the National Metropolis • Benjamin Perley Poore
... Raffle. "You wouldn't be here unless you knew where a good thing is to be picked up. But I must be off. I'm on the Rocky Mountain Canal Company Directory. I'm not above taking my two guineas a day. Good-by, my boy. Remember me to old Optimist." And so Sir Raffle passed on, leaving Crosbie still standing at the ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... step by step, buildings rose up, numbers increased, and distinctions were won, but behind all the outward success was the vitalising energy of the Headmaster, the inspiration of the optimist, ...
— A History of Giggleswick School - From its Foundation 1499 to 1912 • Edward Allen Bell
... reformers, she had a poor taste in dress. She wore her tail at an aimless angle, without chic; her markings were all lopsided. But her soul was ardent, and her life was always directed by some rather inscrutable theory or other. As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit. Later she had adopted a vigorous anarchist policy, and had inaugurated what was probably known in her set as the "Bite at Sight Campaign." ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... optimist! Here's our car. Come home with me and share the supper that I pay for with the tainted money of a plutocrat. Only we haven't any real plutocrats in San Francisco. Only ...
— The Sisters-In-Law • Gertrude Atherton
... find what we were looking for, we found something else which Harding seems firmly convinced is quite as valuable. Of course, he's a bit of an optimist, but it looks as if he were right this time. Anyway, I'm ...
— The Intriguers • Harold Bindloss
... to treasure Mrs. Mudge's words, because even Zenith (and everybody knew that Zenith stood in the van of spiritual and New Thought progress) didn't often have the opportunity to sit at the feet of such an inspiring Optimist and Metaphysical Seer as Mrs. Opal Emerson Mudge, who had lived the Life of Wider Usefulness through Concentration, and in the Silence found those Secrets of Mental Control and the Inner Key which were immediately going to ...
— Babbitt • Sinclair Lewis
... from feeling called to work among this people, I am beginning to doubt the safety of my own soul. I am afraid the desires of Bro. Brown and his family are set too much on carnal things." A dyspeptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... optimist ventured to question a particularly lugubrious statement, he was challenged to explain the betting, which had crept up to six to one on ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... them all in discontented mood; Fearless of Fate, Yet strangely fearful of a comrade's laugh; Reckless and timid, hard and sensitive; In talk a rebel, full of mocking chaff, At heart devout conservative; In love with love, yet hating to be kissed; Inveterate optimist, And judge severe, In reason cloudy but in feeling clear; Keen critic, ardent hero-worshipper, Impatient of restraint in little ways, Yet ever ready to confer On chosen leaders boundless power and praise; Adventurous spirit burning to explore Untrodden paths ...
— The Poems of Henry Van Dyke • Henry Van Dyke
... the other; "a boatswain's life is a life of 'mergency." Giordano Bruno was all paradox; and my mind was not alive to his paradoxes, just as my ears might have become dead to the boatswain's oaths. He was, as has been said, a vorticist before Descartes,[66] an optimist before Leibnitz, a Copernican before Galileo. It would be easy to collect a hundred strange opinions of his. He was born about 1550, and was roasted alive at Rome, February 17, 1600, for the maintenance and defence of ...
— A Budget of Paradoxes, Volume I (of II) • Augustus De Morgan
... banking fraternity with regard to the abnormal exchange situation created by the outbreak of war. Before the Committee of Five they, of course, dwelt mainly upon the question of reopening the market. Sir George Paish, being by nature an optimist, took a very roseate view of the outlook, so much so that some members of the Committee were at first disposed to fear (his mission being that of a collector of debts who sought prompt payment) that his diagnosis of the situation ...
— The New York Stock Exchange in the Crisis of 1914 • Henry George Stebbins Noble
... Ku Hung Ming, author of the "Papers from a Viceroy's Yamen," afterwards said, "All great men are optimists, and Sir Robert Hart was the greatest optimist we had in 1900." His hopefulness encouraged the officials so much that the heads of the Yamen soon sent word they also wished to consult him: this business, if there was any hope of its success, was too big to be entrusted to deputies. Accordingly he began a search for new ...
— Sir Robert Hart - The Romance of a Great Career, 2nd Edition • Juliet Bredon
... my day, but his reading is beautiful; I can't say as I ever heard reading as could equal it;—and them choristers, though they're hawful to manage, is trained as I never see boys trained in my life afore. There's one of them houses, ma'am," continued the optimist, turning to Miss Wentworth, "as is a beauty. Miss Wodehouse can tell you what it is; no lady in the land could desire a handsomer drawing-room; and as for the kitchings,—I don't pretend to be a judge up-stairs, but being brought up a blacksmith, I know what's ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... deplore the scrutin de liste. It will give rise to formidable difficulties in the near future. I am an optimist by nature, but that future seems to me very dark. I do all I can to prevent it by foretelling it to everyone; but I only play the part of Cassandra. In the Council, M. Ferry and myself were the only ones who supported the ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... settled in Missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative, John Quarles, brother-in-law to Mrs. Clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted optimist, well-loved by ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had assured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... had such a man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself—before I met ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... Encyclopaedie,—has recently emerged into clear and respectful recognition, if not into broad and effulgent repute. In divers quarters, of late, the attention of the learned has reverted to the splendid optimist, whose adventurous intellect left nothing unexplored and almost nothing unexplained. Biographers and critics have discussed his theories,—some in the interest of philosophy, and some in the interest of religion,—some in the spirit of discipleship, and some in ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "You're an optimist, I see," and Reynolds smiled for the first time in many a day. He could not help it, for this stranger radiated a stimulating ...
— Glen of the High North • H. A. Cody
... Optimist, as I try to be, I am not one of those who believe that the Negro has reached the delectable mountain, and that he is as good as anybody else. He is far from perfection, far from comparison with the more favored Anglo-Saxon, in ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... What on earth does any man want to get married for? I don't ... Give me my gay bachelor life! My uncle Charlie used to say 'It's better luck to get married than it is to be kicked in the head by a mule.' But he was an optimist. Good-night, Miss Bennett. And ...
— Three Men and a Maid • P. G. Wodehouse
... Georg, who is so gentle in his speech; Simeon, with his diplomatic face; Florian, the student of medicine; and my friend, colossal-breasted Christian. Palmy came a little later, worried with many cares, but happy to his heart's core. No optimist was ever more convinced of his philosophy than Palmy. After them, below the salt, were ranged the knechts and porters, the marmiton from the kitchen, and innumerable maids. The board was tesselated with plates ...
— Sketches and Studies in Italy and Greece, Complete - Series I, II, and III • John Symonds
... philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... spoken of as the man in revolt. He is not. Firstly, because it requires some cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... "You're a bun-headed old optimist," said the Puddin' rudely. "Puddin'-thieves never suffer from remorse. They only suffer from blighted hopes and ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... badge. Then he shuffled back to his former post and sat himself down on his heels once more. Kruger Bobs possessed the racial traits which make it an easy matter to sit and wait for news. He was also an optimist. Nevertheless, his face now was overcast and rarely did it vanish behind the spreading limits of ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... enough for a hero that he succeed without being clever or good, but neither did Graham pass this doubtful and dangerous test. For when you clear away the romance which heroic poetry and excited prose have flung around him, you were an optimist if you did not see his life was one long failure as well as a disappointment and a sorrow. He did bravely with the Prince of Orange, and yet somehow he missed promotion; he was the best officer the government had in Scotland, and yet it was only in the ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... hope is not heard as the ground-tone of these chapters, let it ring through all else at the end. I am an optimist because I am an evolutionist, and because I believe, as every one of those whom I call Eugenists must, that the best is yet to be. The dawn is breaking for womanhood, and therefore for all mankind. If we are asked to express in one phrase the reason ...
— Woman and Womanhood - A Search for Principles • C. W. Saleeby
... bun-headed old optimist,' said the Puddin' rudely. 'Puddin'-thieves never suffer from remorse. They only suffer from blighted hopes and ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... the surface of the globe. There is no reason to expect that the manufacturers, merchants, and shopkeepers of Ireland would be less willing or less able to play an active and useful part in the affairs of their country than the same classes in England or Scotland. It will be said that this is mere optimist prophesying. But why is that to be flung aside under the odd name of sentimentalism, while pessimist prophesying is ...
— Handbook of Home Rule (1887) • W. E. Gladstone et al.
... jump to this conclusion. Writing on his novels, Mr. W. E. Henley called him "the great optimist." The Kreutzer Sonata is the work of a profound pessimist. Concluding What To Do, Tolstoi wrote a noble passage on the sacredness of motherhood. Now all that is changed. Motherhood must go too. It will take time, for the old Adam is strong in us. But go it must, and when we have all ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... nice, quiet, gentlemanly little optimist, and I like you, old fellow," retorted Cullen. "But don't deceive yourself too much. Your Senator Langdon is personally one of the best ever. But he was born a mark, and a mark he'll be ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress—the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel—stood unnoticed at the young man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from his gloomy meditations ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... opportunity to leave without being noticed, and, carrying his trusty rifle at the ready, he stealthily disappeared in the brush south of the spring. A young boy, with a new gun and lots of brush to prowl through! Under such circumstances the optimist can imagine ...
— Partners of Chance • Henry Herbert Knibbs
... Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cow- punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It was not like ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... The books that should sell sometimes do not "move" at all, and those that apparently have but little to recommend them turn out to be the best of the bunch so far as sales are concerned. A jobber has to be something of an optimist; he must keep his ear to the ground, and, like certain types of politicians, must be prepared to give the people what they want when they want it. He can of course help along the demand for good books and ...
— The Building of a Book • Various
... who was following them into the hall. 'Oh, I hate pessimists! What's the latest definition of them? Ah, I know; an optimist is a person who doesn't care what happens as long as it doesn't ...
— Love at Second Sight • Ada Leverson
... for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations, for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child! Pulwick at least nursed ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... and is nothing but the vividness of his dialogues. It is a great deal more; it lies in the truth of his characters, subtly drawn, but irresistible, and, now and again, tenderly pathetic. Thus may you see the optimist and pessimist, and the link between them, in the following scene in the ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... isn't the man our combination decided on, but the trouble is that our combination is going to fall through. Sam's an optimist, but you'll see I'm right. There are too many conflicting elements of us in one boat. We can't lose three votes and win, and it's a safe bet we lose them. The Consolidated must know by this time what we have been about all night. They're ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... out!" declared Ned, who was something of an optimist. "You've been in salt mines before, haven't ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... pay these three weeks, but I doubt the officer will know what has become of the money." It is the firm conviction of every private soldier in "K(1)" that all fines and deductions go straight into the pocket of the officer who levies them. Private Hogg, always an optimist, opines: "The officers should know better how to treat us now, for they all get ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... that," returned Patty the optimist, "before we know it we'll be walking up one side of the platform for our diplomas and coming down ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... and if a pursuer should follow him under the rock his only chance would lie in getting hold, after a fight, of the man's loaded revolver or ammunition-belt. Such a hope involved a great deal of confidence, but de Spain was an optimist—most railroad men are. ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... the beginning of the next year, was almost invariably cheerful, and she showed by the completion of Persuasion that she was capable of first-rate literary work during the summer of 1816. The fact is that, as to health, she was an incurable optimist; her natural good spirits made her see the best side, and her unselfishness prompted the suppression of anything that might distress those around her. Nothing, for instance, could be more lively than the following letter to Edward Austen, written while he was still at Winchester School, ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... went on the little man, "I am an optimist; it is in consequence of this that I now make pessimism. I have always had ideals; seeing myself cut off from them for ever, I must complain; to ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... of great capabilities who only just fell short of being learned, with a clear, critical intellect; a man without any illusions about Society, the State, Literature, or anything else, and especially not about women; but yet he was the craziest Optimist as soon as he got upon the subject of actresses, theatrical princesses and heroines; he was one of those men, who, like Hacklaender, cannot discover the Ideal of Virtue anywhere, except ...
— The Works of Guy de Maupassant, Volume III (of 8) • Guy de Maupassant
... reports; but on calm reflection it appears like an exaggerated statement. I am not sure that a kindergarten in every ward of every city in America "would almost shut up the penitentiaries, sir!" The most determined optimist is weighed down by the feeling that it will take more than the ardent prosecution of any one reform, however vital, to produce such a result. We appoint investigating committees, who ask more and more questions, compile more and more statistics, ...
— Children's Rights and Others • Kate Douglas Smith Wiggin
... roused. "Why, then I fell in with Kellogg again; he found me trying the open-air cure on a bench in Washington Square. Since then he's been finding me one berth after another. He's a sure-enough optimist." ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... a noble optimist. If we fail, it will not be for lack of trying. Forward, my lads, and we'll reach the ...
— The Star of Gettysburg - A Story of Southern High Tide • Joseph A. Altsheler
... by boat and train they were highly convivial, but they instinctively kept together. Dr. Bull, who had always been the optimist of the party, endeavoured to persuade the other four that the whole company could take the same hansom cab from Victoria; but this was over-ruled, and they went in a four-wheeler, with Dr. Bull on the box, singing. They finished their journey at ...
— The Man Who Was Thursday - A Nightmare • G. K. Chesterton
... 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 ...
— The Girl Wanted • Nixon Waterman
... were not sufficient motives in the eyes of Bulthaupt and d'Albert for the first fratricide; there must be an infusion of psychology and modern philosophy. Abel is an optimist, an idealist, a contented dreamer, joying in the loveliness of life and nature; Cain, a pessimist, a morose brooder, for whom life contained no beautiful illusions. He gets up from his couch in the night to question ...
— A Second Book of Operas • Henry Edward Krehbiel
... pessimist. Neither Swift nor Carlyle could have gone much beyond him in condemning the actual state of the political or religious condition of the world. Things, on the whole, were in many directions going from bad to worse. The optimist is apt to regard these views as wicked, and I do not know whether it will be considered as an aggravation or an extenuation of his offence that, holding such opinions, Fitzjames could be steadily cheerful. I simply state the fact. ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... his shoulders. "I would I could share your optimism," he said. "What a picture have we! The most venerable statesman in the country finding some hope for individual liberty in this Constitution; the youngest, an optimist by nature and habit, sanguine by youth and temperament, trembling for the powers it may confer upon a people too democratically inclined. This is true, sir—is ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... Devil, his frank delight in earthquakes and pestilences, and his belief that every one but himself will be brought back to life in time to be frozen to death in the next glacial epoch, seem rather to stamp him as an optimist. By birth and training a man of the people, he was yet an aristocrat to the finger-tips, and Byron would have called him brother, though one trembles to think what he would have called Byron. First and last, he was ...
— And Even Now - Essays • Max Beerbohm
... might term the optimist's philosophy is—If you can mend a situation mend it; if you can't mend ...
— More Toasts • Marion Dix Mosher
... was ever an optimist. The next morning he saw on a newspaper placard: "Birthday Honours. Twenty-two New Knights." And he actually stopped his car, bought a paper, and searched the lists for his name. It was ...
— Bones in London • Edgar Wallace |
