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More "Pessimistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... a row of great elms, and in its centre was the ducking-pond, according to Riseholme tradition, though perhaps in less classical villages it might have passed merely for a duck-pond. But in Riseholme it would have been rank heresy to dream, even in the most pessimistic moments, of its being anything but a ducking-pond. Close by it stood a pair of stocks, about which there was no doubt whatever, for Mr Lucas had purchased them from a neighbouring iconoclastic village, where they ...
— Queen Lucia • E. F. Benson
... would listen to him, I urged him to bring out a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some time he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To the poet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a second edition. ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... having a hard time, and it's made him pessimistic. He's written a play, and he was ruining it with an unhappy ending. But now—oh, now it has a happy ending! It'll be a success! (Rushes to Will.) Oh, Will, I see just how it goes! I've got the very words! Let me write them, while they're fresh in my mind! ...
— The Pot Boiler • Upton Sinclair
... Mr. Jervis, a heavy, pessimistic man, wondered how they managed it, and Mr. Jervis's wonder had its own voluptuous quality. Mr. Vereker and Mr. Norris, who held that a strike was a downright serious matter, also wondered. But they were sustained ...
— The Tree of Heaven • May Sinclair
... at me and laughed softly. "For a naturally cheerful, and even gay young man," said she, "you are most amazingly pessimistic. The mantle of Jeremiah—if he ever wore one—seems to have fallen on you, but without in the least impairing your good spirits excepting in regard ...
— The Vanishing Man • R. Austin Freeman
... the meantime his friend may somewhere lose one and enable him to get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, is that he fully realises that the bunker ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... out, but he continued to sit at the little table, reveling in the happiness of a man who feels that he has been called to some purpose worth while. His companion hesitated to interrupt his thoughts; her somewhat drab business experience made her pessimistic toward all idealism, and yet she felt that here, surely, was a man who could carry almost any project through to success. The unique quality in him, which distinguished him from any other man she had ever known, was his complete unselfishness. In all ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... green grasses, which the Admiral considered must have floated off from some island; "not the continent," says the Admiral, whose theories are not to be disturbed by a piece of grass, "because I make the continental land farther onward." The crew, ready to take the most depressing and pessimistic view of everything, considered that the lumps of grass belonged to rocks or submerged lands, and murmured disparaging things about the Admiral. As a matter of fact these grasses were masses of seaweed detached from the Sargasso Sea, which they ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... hath a continual feast,' which shows that if we are truly happy, everything about us will appear brighter and more delightful. Again, it says: 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.' How true this is; you never saw a sour, gloomy pessimistic person who was in real good health, while the one who shows the most gladsome face is either in splendid physical condition or else has risen above his pains and distress in his appreciation of God's blessings. They are always believing ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... blow us up?" asked the Frenchman, sober now, and extremely pessimistic. "They could do it. Or is it the women they ...
— The Golden Silence • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... before we pass on to other themes, seems a good place to say that we live in a very stupid old world, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. The proof of this seemingly pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, and the Master of the Hounds wore a bigger medal ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... know?"—"What does any one know?"—of this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear of ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to the people as a whole—chiefly in consequence of the national disasters— judgements of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the opposing force which then manifested itself ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... His mood was pessimistic, even for a man who sees the traffic which is his keenest interest threatened by a marauding gang of land pirates. Maybe it was the wearing hours of McLagan's nagging that caused his mood. Maybe it was an inclination brought about by the long train of disappointments that had been ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... twenty-five, and pulled the flag up. He spat gloomily out into the street, and his purple lips moved in words. He seemed to say something like "Sale diable de metier!" which, considering the fact that he had just been overpaid, appears unwarrantably pessimistic in tone. Thereafter he spat again, picked up his reins and jerked ...
— Jason • Justus Miles Forman
... runs a strong thread of unbroken development. Hermann, the immature hero of the former, and his associates, bequeath a number of characteristics to the title-hero and his associates of the latter; but where the earlier work is predominantly sarcastic, political, and pessimistic, the later one is humorous, intellectual, and optimistic. It would seem, therefore, that, in view of its bright outlook, mature view, and sympathetic treatment, Immermann's greatest epic in prose was destined to be read in its entirety, frequently, ...
— The German Classics of The Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries, Vol. VII. • Various
... takes a highly pessimistic view of the Nirv[a]nic state, regarding it as annihilation. Later ...
— The Buddhist Catechism • Henry S. Olcott
... made our friend pessimistic about anarchism, at times, and inclined to join the socialist party. His life is made miserable by the ceaseless debate of his mind and soul over which of these two philosophies is the best one for the race. He, suspiciously, is always looking for another case like Nicoll's, ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... cafe which was shut, and sat waiting on green chairs outside. Around us old men were talking of the news in the papers. They said that Bulgaria was making territorial demands, and as the Balkan governments covet land above all things they felt pessimistic as to whether Serbia would concede anything, and said, shaking their heads, "It ...
— The Luck of Thirteen - Wanderings and Flight through Montenegro and Serbia • Jan Gordon
... certainly be worse if everybody knew. Betty puckered her smooth forehead into rows and rows of wrinkles and still she saw no way out. She thought of consulting Nan, but she couldn't bear to, when Nan had always been so pessimistic about Eleanor. ...
— Betty Wales, Sophomore • Margaret Warde
... his old spirit and refused to be discouraged by my pessimistic view of his expedition. He laughed gayly and pointed across the country where half a dozen spires of smoke were rising. There was the railroad. There was the great highway where his real journey was to start. There was the beginning of his great adventure. I was the last outpost ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... paced the room, but outside in the road her gaze fell on old Aaron who was uneasily pacing, too, and in his drooping shoulders and grimly set face she read no encouragement to hope. That morose and pessimistic figure held her gaze with a fascination of terror and she watched it until its pacing finally carried it around a twist of the road. Then she went out and stood under the tree which in its wordlessness was still a more ...
— The Roof Tree • Charles Neville Buck
... beliefs is their practical effect in life. If it be true that optimism compels the world forward, and pessimism retards it, then it is dangerous to propagate a pessimistic philosophy. One who believes that the pain in the world outweighs the joy, and expresses that unhappy conviction, only adds to the pain. Schopenhauer is an enemy to the race. Even if he earnestly believed that this is the most wretched of possible worlds, he should not promulgate a doctrine ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... been saved at the brink of a precipice; but then Szedvilas went away, and Jonas, who was a sharp little man, reminded them that the delicatessen business was a failure, according to its proprietor, and that this might account for his pessimistic views. Which, ...
— The Jungle • Upton Sinclair
... Jimmy became a symbol. The more I long for peace, the more I long for that historic smoke. When Louisa's brother or Nora's uncle has a long pessimistic talk with KITCHENER, then I look sadly at my cigar; but when FRENCH and JOFFRE unbend to Vera's stepfather or Beryl's cousin and give him words of cheer, then I take it out and pinch it fondly, and already I see the ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... uncommon to find incontinence of faeces making its appearance also. These extensions of the fault only take place when the management continues to be very faulty, when the grown-up people around them are more than usually distressed and pessimistic, and have redoubled their expostulations ...
— The Nervous Child • Hector Charles Cameron
... ill of me, Padre Sibyla, if I differ from your view of the affair, but it's my peculiar fate to be almost always in opposition to my brethren. I say, then, that we ought not to be so pessimistic. The instruction in Castilian can be allowed without any risk whatever, and in order that it may not appear to be a defeat of the University, we Dominicans ought to put forth our efforts and be the first to rejoice over it—that should be our policy. To what end are we to be engaged ...
— The Reign of Greed - Complete English Version of 'El Filibusterismo' • Jose Rizal
... the other hand, was a bitter opponent of what she called "ring rule," and Adelaide Rich, who was the only recruit that they could succeed in adding to their party, had never forgotten the depths of iniquity which her pessimistic acquaintance had revealed in the seemingly innocent and well conducted first meeting, and was prepared to distrust everything, down to ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... in a pessimistic humour. He was one of those men who are brave enough on good wine and victuals, but lack the stamina to fight when hungry. He returned presently with the required information. The Plaza de Cadiz was, it appeared, quite close. Indeed, the town of ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... Lothario, or a lover pour le bon motif? What are his distinguished family to think of the love affair, which would certainly ensue in fiction, though in real life nobody thought of it at all? Are we to end happily, with a marriage or marriages, or are we to wind all up in the pleasant, pessimistic, realistic, fashionable modern way? Is Mary to drown the baby in the Muckle Pool? Is she to suffer the penalty of her crime at Inverness? Or, happy thought, shall we not make her discarded rival lover meet Dick in ...
— Adventures among Books • Andrew Lang
... Chinese armaments no mention is ever made of the Yuen-nan army, and statistics are hard to get. But it is evident that the cult of the military stands paramount, and it has to be conceded, even by the most pessimistic critics of this backward province, that the new troops are sufficiently numerous and sufficiently well-organized to crush any rebellion. This must be counted a very fair result, since it has been attained in about two years. A couple of years ago Yuen-nan had practically no army—none ...
— Across China on Foot • Edwin Dingle
... smile incredulously. Let our enemies laugh at our pretensions to penetrate the world-mysteries of Aryavarta," as a certain critic recently expressed himself. However pessimistic may be our critics' views, yet, even in the event of our conclusions not proving more trustworthy than those of Fergusson, Wilson, Wheeler, and the rest of the archeologists and Sanskritists who have written about India, ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... the night in planning in their desert camp. Hiram's frank, open nature tended to breed confidence in the most pessimistic of men; and when he told Filer of the wonderful character of Jerkline Jo and assured him that, despite his past rascality, he would be handsomely rewarded by her, the helpless old man agreed to all that ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... gesture of despair. He sat down in the high armchair that stood on the hearth, and tapped on the floor with one foot in pessimistic thought. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... attacked 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 ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... the record of public opinion, and from time to time have invoked the aid of psychometry, which has dissipated every fear and contradicted all the pessimistic notions of politicians and newspaper correspondents down ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... and girls are to be the men and women of to-morrow, with all the responsibilities of the world resting upon their shoulders? Do we want them to enter upon the duties of life stoop-shouldered, flat-chested, spectacle-eyed? Do we want them to be anaemic, pessimistic, nervous wrecks? Do we want them to be mental weaklings and moral cowards? Do we want them even to approximate these conditions? No? Then, with all our provisions for their wants and their needs, let us be sure to develop those things ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... culture, and never read. They will perhaps one day be the Rogers's statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not think that any jester of the older day—the day of Touchstone or of Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of Autolycus—"For the life to come, I jest out ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... Church such characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... annual convention of the association was held Dec. 14-19, 1915, in Washington, the scene of many which had preceded it, with 546 accredited delegates, the largest number on record. The one of the preceding year had left many of the members in a pessimistic frame of mind but this had entirely disappeared and never were there so much hope and optimism.[99] The Federal Amendment had for the first time been debated and voted on in the House of Representatives, ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... to be beside myself. But as the whole country seemed to be already in a state of desperation I have come to the conclusion that it would not do any good to add pain to sorrow. Therefore, instead of uttering pessimistic views I have been speaking words of encouragement to raise our spirits. In this, however, I have exhausted my own strength. My friend, Mr. Hsu Fo- su, told me some five or six years ago that it was impossible ...
— The Fight For The Republic In China • B.L. Putnam Weale
... but the great preacher himself visited Madeley, and it is significant that the straight-speaking old man did not take the same pessimistic view of Fletcher's work as he did himself. After preaching to crowds of his people, Wesley speaks of Madeley as a great and encouraging "prospect." "There are many adversaries indeed," writes the Father of Methodism, "but yet they cannot shut the ...
— Fletcher of Madeley • Brigadier Margaret Allen
... the Pacific Union Club that the Southern Pacific had raised its rates to Southern points. One might have sensed that shadow which hangs always over commercial California in the sombreness which froze the group at this news. From five minutes of pessimistic discussion, Goodyear led them by a scattered fire of personalities. Billy Darnton was going to give a bull's head breakfast at San Jacinto. Al Hemphill was coming to it all the way from New York. Charlie ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... very superior indeed. All his eggs had two yolks, and all his geese were swans. What he liked, he loved; and what he did not like, he hated. There was no golden mean with him; he was either very optimistic or else intensely pessimistic. Hence, naturally, he gave hard knocks to those who differed from him in opinion, and particularly after the Restoration; for he was one of the most expressive among King Charles II's courtiers. Direct evidence of this special ...
— Sylva, Vol. 1 (of 2) - Or A Discourse of Forest Trees • John Evelyn
... them. In the birds she found her true allies. They were not attached to the higher civilisation. The higher civilisation, so far, had treated them inconsiderately, at sparrow clubs. The Owl talked a good deal about the low moral tone of the human race in this respect, and was pessimistic about it, failing to perceive that higher types of organisms always like to signify their superiority over lower ones by shooting them, or otherwise making their lives a burden. The Owl, however, was a very talented bird, and one felt that even his fallacies were a mark of attainments ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... they would declare this the best of all possible worlds, and insist that to secure happiness it is necessary only to follow natural instincts. On the other hand, the disharmonious creatures, those ill adapted to the conditions of life, would be pessimistic philosophers. Consider the case of the ladybird, driven by hunger and with a preference for honey, which searches for it on flowers and meets only with failure, or of insects driven by their instincts into the flames, only to lose their wings and ...
— The World's Greatest Books - Volume 15 - Science • Various
... Cochran was mildly pessimistic. He had seen too many other heralded inventions which worked well experimentally but failed in the hemp fields. Of course Casey ...
— Terry - A Tale of the Hill People • Charles Goff Thomson
... the war is about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer, working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has come into human affairs; that our ostensible ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... now," said Madeleine. "We know your love for paradox. But not to-day. There's no time for philosophising today. Besides, you are in a pessimistic mood, and that's ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... others pessimistic. Some are always joyful, others as constantly see only the dark side of life. Some are always serious and solemn, others always gay, even giddy. These permanent emotional attitudes constitute temperament, and are due to fundamental differences within the body that are in some ...
— The Science of Human Nature - A Psychology for Beginners • William Henry Pyle
... consequent gravity of the military situation in Natal, he unexpectedly hurried thither in order to supervise personally the operations, but on the 15th of December his first attempt to cross the Tugela at Colenso (see LADYSMITH) was repulsed. The government, alarmed at the situation and the pessimistic tone of Buller's messages, sent out Lord Roberts to supersede him in the chief command, Sir Redvers being left in subordinate command of the Natal force. His second attempt to relieve Ladysmith ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 4, Part 4 - "Bulgaria" to "Calgary" • Various
... Mr. JOHN MURRAY'S pessimistic forecast is his failure to recognise and advocate the only and obvious remedy. By the reduction of the Bread Subsidy fifty millions have been made available for the relief of national needs. We do not say that this would be enough, but if carefully laid out in grants to deserving novelists, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... of their true place in the long perspective of English literature. Meredith, with the analytical temper and the disconnected style of Browning, is for mature readers, not for young people. Hardy has decided power, but is too hopelessly pessimistic for anybody's comfort,—except in his earlier works, which have a romantic charm that brightens the ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... call names, John Mayrant—but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately with these political diseases. ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... unavailingly. The feeling of flatness, the sense of dissatisfaction with the world as it stood, grew instead of diminishing. At last, throwing down the paper, he gave up the unequal struggle and yielded to the pessimistic pleasure of self-analysis. He recalled last night and its vexatious trend of events, and with something akin to shame, he remembered his anger against Max; but although he admitted its possible exaggeration, the admission brought no palliation of Max's ...
— Max • Katherine Cecil Thurston
... But this pessimistic view of life rarely appears on the monuments. Not infrequently the departed expresses a certain satisfaction with his life's record, as does a citizen of Beneventum, who remarks:[46] "No man have I wronged, to many have I rendered services," or he ...
— The Common People of Ancient Rome - Studies of Roman Life and Literature • Frank Frost Abbott
... was the best prophylactic against disease. The wearing of phylacteries indicates that they were regarded by the Jews as amulets. Belief in the power of the Law became the antidote against what may be termed "Satanophobia," a pessimistic and habitual dread of ...
— Primitive Psycho-Therapy and Quackery • Robert Means Lawrence
... all delightful, and almost as good as a holiday. The city clerk, the jaded shopman, the weary milliner, the pessimistic dyspeptic, should each read the book. It will bring a suggestion of sea breezes, the plash of waves, and all the accessories of a holiday by ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... his chair and went upstairs to his own room. The impression made upon him by Maria Addolorata, when she had bitten her hand, had been a strong one, but the man's nature, though not exactly distrustful, was melancholic and pessimistic. Two hours and more had passed since they had been together, and things had a different look. He realized more clearly the strength of the ties which bound Maria to her convent life, and the effort it must be to her to break them. He remembered the ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid. Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... we perceived the slightest signs of Kirby's presence in our rear, and my faith was strong that his party had either lost our trail, or been turned aside by fear of encountering Indians. In this respect Kennedy remained more pessimistic than I, yet even in his mind confidence began to dawn that we had outstripped our enemies, both white and red, and that a few miles more must bring us in safety to some pioneer settlement. The poor condition of our horses compelled us to rest frequently, and our own utter exhaustion led to ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... of the book of Ecclesiastes. It evidently comes from one of the many wisdom teachers who flourished during the Greek period and it speaks in the name of Solomon. It is an essay on the value of life. In its original form its thought was so pessimistic that it has been supplemented at many points by later editors. These insertions include (1) proverbs commending wisdom and praising the current wisdom teachings, and (2) the work of a pious scribe, a forerunner of the later Pharisees, who sought to ...
— The Makers and Teachers of Judaism • Charles Foster Kent
... faith in their governmental process was steadily declining. Six out of 10 Americans were saying they were pessimistic about their future. A new kind of defeatism was heard. Some said our domestic problems were uncontrollable, that we had to learn to live with this seemingly endless cycle of high inflation ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... pain. The leader maintains a hopeful, joyous demeanor so that his followers may also be joyous or hopeful and thus be energized to their best. Morale is the state of emotion of a group; it is raised when joyous, energizing emotions are set working in the group and is lowered when pessimistic deenergizing emotions become dominant. A city or a nation becomes energized with good news and success and deenergized when the battle ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... be thought that we are excessively pessimistic in pointing rather to the dangers which the Treaty places on the tapis than to the good sense of those who will deal with them. We do not say that the Italians would have permitted their Government to solve the Adriatic question in a safer and more philosophic manner; but we cannot look ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... John Graham, at the Union Stock Yards in Chicago, to his son, Pierrepont, at The Planters' Palace Hotel, at Big Gap, Kentucky. Mr. Pierrepont's orders are small and his expenses are large, so his father feels pessimistic over his ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... Miss Chris. First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a pessimistic head. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... counterpart condemnation of the actual, wherever the actual does not conform to that ideal. The spontaneous soul, the soul of the child, is naturally revolutionary; and when the revolution fails, the soul of the youth becomes naturally pessimistic. All moral life and moral judgment have this deeply romantic character; they venture to assert a private ideal in the face of an intractable and omnipotent world. Some moralists begin by feeling the attraction of untasted and ideal perfection. These, like ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... in so pessimistic a mood. I did not share his sombre view of either matter, though I confined my remarks to the one that seemed to weigh most heavily on ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... colonel got close, Lance tossed off a salute and an insouciant grin: "Well, the Prodigal made it back home, sir. Hope that pessimistic daughter of yours ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... Malthus's pessimistic prophecy of the increase of population beyond the means of subsistence has been subjected to refutation by various causes. For one thing, among civilized races at least, the birth-rate is declining. ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... ship-building program with reference to conditions after the war. It is only within ten days that we have realized that the end of the war will be one of defeat unless we build twice as fast as we proposed to build. You know that I am not pessimistic. It is not my habit to look upon the gloomy side of things. It is no kindness to the American people or to France or England to give them words of good cheer now. This war is right at this minute a challenge to every particle of brains and inventive ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... above. That there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. Unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. That there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that I agree with the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry in stating that: "I have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism of the man who doubts the capacity ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... "I believe!" is the common chord in Browning's music. His optimism is in striking contrast to the attitude of his contemporaries, for the general tone of nineteenth century literature is pessimistic. Amidst the wails and lamentations of the poets, the clear, triumphant voice of Browning is refreshing even to those who are ...
— Robert Browning: How To Know Him • William Lyon Phelps
... lower his rate of profit in goodness, and if God will shipwreck all Job's prosperity, and sting him with the serpent-touch of dire disease, then will Job become as others. Profit in goodness gone, his goodness will "fade as doth a leaf." This is evil's pessimistic philosophy, and Job, on whom calamitous circumstances pile as Dagon's temple on Samson's head; Job, trusting where he can not see, and making his appeal to God, whose ways are hid,—is the lie given to Satan's prophecies, and the vindication of God's confidence ...
— A Hero and Some Other Folks • William A. Quayle
... summing up the whole situation, "I mean to buy pigs and live pretty," whatever that expression might mean. His ideas of matrimony were, however, almost entirely of a pessimistic order, as he was for ever slapping me on the back and urging me to buck up, mistaking those delicious love musings which, I suppose, every bridegroom indulges in for fits ...
— A Queen's Error • Henry Curties
... was not accustomed to be addressed in so pessimistic a tone, and the mere mention of her arch-enemy— Glenwilliam—had put defiance into her. With some dryness, she preached energy, watchfulness, and a hopeful mind. The agent grasped the situation with the quickness born of ...
— The Coryston Family • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... the dignity of an English classic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' and 'unhealthy.' ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the side of the higher rather than the lower thought, the nobler rather than the baser. He deliberately takes the optimistic rather than the pessimistic view of everything, the helpful, rather than the cynical, because he knows that to be fundamentally the true view. By looking continually for the good in everything that he may endeavour to strengthen it, by striving always to help ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... not wait to hear the judge controvert my friend's pessimistic philosophy, but with a brusque "good-night" hurried away. The window banged behind me, a sharp commentary on my rudeness. The iron gate clanged again, and I was off down the hill, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... man's will, and the fire of their old ambition has cooled into the dull embers of resignation and then died into the apathy of contentment with things that are. Worse still, they have grown fond of their prison world, and the most pessimistic feature in the Fijian situation of to-day is the evident fact that there is almost no discontent among the natives. Old things have withered and decayed, but new ambition has not ...
— Popular Science Monthly Volume 86
... situation, Frank Merriwell had not given up hope. He was young, and he still believed that all evil things come to an evil end, and all good things eventually triumph. He had not grown cynical and pessimistic. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... to please a set of conceited performers and a very motley audience,—I mean the want of money."[127] This degraded condition of the London stage Scott thought to be a consequence of limiting the number of theaters. We can hardly suppose, however, that he was pessimistic in regard to the written drama of his day, when he could say of Byron, "There is one who, to judge from the dramatic sketch he has given us in Manfred, must be considered as a match for Aeschylus, even in his sublimest moods of horror";[128] or when he could ...
— Sir Walter Scott as a Critic of Literature • Margaret Ball
... predictions are far from showing that Seneca had the least inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its whole task? Why, human wickedness ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... became very pessimistic, and believed that the world was sinking fast into dull materialism, petty selfishness, and moral anarchy. He had less opportunity of knowing what was going on in the world than most people, in his sheltered and secluded life, with his court of friends and worshippers. And indeed it was not a rational ...
— Where No Fear Was - A Book About Fear • Arthur Christopher Benson
... Atkins, it is the same thing as asserting that the respect and fondness are evoked by close contact with one's countrymen: nothing more nor less. A hospital ward is a haphazard selection of one's fellow-Britons: the most wildly haphazard it is possible to conceive. And the pessimistic cynic who, after a sojourn in that changing company for a month or two can still either generalise about them or (if he does) can still not acknowledge that in the mass they are amazingly lovable, is beyond hope. The war has taught its lessons to us all, and none more important than ...
— Observations of an Orderly - Some Glimpses of Life and Work in an English War Hospital • Ward Muir
... Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... A Pessimistic Matron (the usual beady and bugle-y female, who takes all her pleasure as a penance). Well, they may call it "Venice," but I don't see no difference from what it was when the Barnum Show was ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 30, 1892 • Various
... thinking gloomily that it would be just his luck to meet Mrs. Bartlett unexpectedly in the streets of Fort Erie on one of those rare occasions when he was enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. He had the most pessimistic forebodings of what the future might have in store for him. Sometimes, when neighbors or customers "treated" him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... just as white is not black, and day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal forces which beleaguer human life is a "pessimistic" one, or else ...
— Some Diversions of a Man of Letters • Edmund William Gosse
... is a melancholy one. The narrow life, with its isolation and its hardships, makes him pessimistic and brooding, though endowed with the keen instinct and peculiar humor of those who are far removed from the artificialities of life. But Mr. Black ascribes this temperament, not to race or hardship or isolation, but to the strange sights and sounds ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... pessimistic. All his energy had left him. London had become hard, hostile, cruel, impossible. He longed for Leek ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... gray eyes, one would have expected Baxter to be genial of temper, with a tendency toward wordiness of speech. But though he had occasional flashes of humor, his ordinary demeanor was characterized by a mild cynicism, which, with his gloomy pessimistic philosophy, so foreign to the temperament that should accompany his physical type, could only be accounted for upon the hypothesis of some secret sorrow such as I have suggested. What it might be no one knew. He ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... Frobisher, cheerfully—for he had begun to have quite a strong liking for the cultured and patriotic Chinese gentleman and sailor, and was sorry to find him taking so pessimistic a view of the situation—"that matters are not so bad as you imagine, and that China will issue from the coming struggle more powerful ...
— A Chinese Command - A Story of Adventure in Eastern Seas • Harry Collingwood
... there. Having finished their summer work on Ten Mile Creek, they had come down the Yukon, bound for Circle City. But at Sixty Mile they had learned of the strike, and stopped off to look over the ground. They had just returned to their boat when Daylight landed his flour, and their report was pessimistic. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... so confidently I am afraid that I was not very successful in cheering up my companions in misfortune. This second disappointment was producing its effect upon them; they were becoming depressed and pessimistic; and although they all agreed that the proper thing to do was to hang on to the distant barque, in the hope of eventually attracting the attention of somebody aboard her, I could see that we were all fully convinced that the attempt would result ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... the mosquito-like T. Haviland Hicks, Jr., advanced on the stronghold of old Bildad, so named because he was a pessimistic Job's comforter, like Bildad, the Shuhite, of old—like a flock of German spies reconnoitering Allied trenches. Hearing the house, with Butch and Beef holding the helpless, but loudly protesting Hicks, who would fain have executed what may mildly be termed a strategic ...
— T. Haviland Hicks Senior • J. Raymond Elderdice
... popular desire for education is very pronounced. American opinion as to the capability of the Filipinos to attain a high degree of learning and maintain it seems much divided, for many return to America and publicly express pessimistic views on this point. In daily conversation with young middle-class Filipinos one can readily see that the ambition of the majority is limited to the acquisition of sufficient English to qualify them for Government employment or commercial occupations. The industries of the ...
— The Philippine Islands • John Foreman
... sat down under the tarpaulin and ate a second breakfast thrice as hearty. The heavy, purging toil of weeks had given him the stomach and appetite of a wolf. He could eat anything, in any quantity, and be unaware that he possessed a digestion. Shorty he found voluble and pessimistic, and from him he received surprising tips concerning their bosses and ominous forecasts of the expedition. Thomas Stanley Sprague was a budding mining engineer and the son of a millionaire. Doctor Adolph Stine was also the son of a wealthy father. And, through ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the unused rhythm, the fresh and novel cadence, that stamped the now hackneyed measure with a lyric's name. Yet, as to its art and imagery, the same effects are there, differing only in a more vigorous method, an intentional roughness, from the individual early verse. The new burthen is termed pessimistic, but for all its impatient summary of ills, it ends ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume XIII • John Lord
... your only consolation will be to fall back on the comforting thought that you have behaved like a gentleman, and that any discourtesy of hers cannot detract from the merit of your action. You did not do it for the thanks you might receive, but because it is right. It is not pessimistic to assert that all through life, we are working on this principle—not that we may receive the credit for what we do, but doing good for the good's sake. Do not be so rash as to say bitterly—"So much for sacrificing my ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... manifold and complicated institutions, began to readjust itself in his mind with sole reference to its possible influence upon the baby's fate. Political questions were no longer convenient pegs to hang pessimistic epigrams on, but became matters of vital interest because they affected the moral condition of the country in which the baby was to grow up. Socialistic agitations, which a dispassionate bachelor could afford to ...
— Ilka on the Hill-Top and Other Stories • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... and methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... impression that he might be himself invisible to these people, that, living in another element, they actually could not see or fairly sense anything outside. He looked from them to the two older women of the same race with their children, and again his pessimistic attitude, evolved from his own misery, set his mind in a bitterly interrogative attitude. He looked at the bride and the mistakenly happy mother caressing the evil-looking child, and a sickening disgust of ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... he was riding away from them, these things impressed Dick more than when he was among them. Sergeant Whitley's warning and pessimistic words came back to him with new force, but, as he rode into the depths of the forest, he shook off all depression. Those words, "Seventy thousand strong!" continually recurred to him. Yes, they would be seventy thousand strong when Buell ...
— The Guns of Shiloh • Joseph A. Altsheler
... O. A. C. had gone down to inglorious defeat before their rivals from Gold Hill—thirty-six to nothing on last Thanksgiving Day—and the sting of those defeats had made Ophir pessimistic and their eleven a joke. Another Thanksgiving Day was less than two months ahead, and the Ophir fellows were turning to Merriwell for help. They felt that if any one could pick an eleven from the club members and round them, into winning ...
— Frank Merriwell, Junior's, Golden Trail - or, The Fugitive Professor • Burt L. Standish
... liftmen, who, you recollect, Spoke of Adolphus with respect, Are pessimistic, even for them, About the fate of ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 8th, 1920 • Various
... of greasy smoke he glimpsed an active figure—the only human being in sight except himself—and he hastened to its side. It was Fay, the night-watchman, a powerful, stocky man who clearly did not share the tanner's pessimistic conviction. He had ransacked the premises for every hand fire-extinguisher he could find, had brought them to the burning buildings and, with fine optimism, was now spraying their contents on the edges ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... society, in order that those impressions may not exist. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic sentiments, but sentiments that are calm, innocent, and joyous, like Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression of these things also; ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... for the latter and threatens to cast him off if a marriage of the pair should take place. Laura is an agnostic and a sort of 'new woman' who maintains a constant attitude of disdain towards her stepfather. She and George have spent much of their youth together, discussed pessimistic theories in Piper's hearing, and generally ignored him, and made him feel his ignorance in ways very trying to the temper of a man who, 'now that his money-making days were over, had a passion for dictating absolutely to everyone ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... "We know your love for paradox. But not to-day. There's no time for philosophising today. Besides, you are in a pessimistic mood, ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... whether you get castor-oil or cake," was the pessimistic reply of one who had gone through bitter experiences along those lines. "This just shows what belongin' t' orders does for you, Dan. If Ben wasn't a member o' the Bow Wows, I'll bet he could 'a' died an' hardly any one would 'a' known it but his mother. An' now ...
— Baldy of Nome • Esther Birdsall Darling
... chiffon belts, you mean, not costumes, if we go by Corbett's clothes ideas," growled the pessimistic, prospective producer of the possible next season's hit ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... usually "a sober and cautious" person, fairly content with the present and not very sure about the future. The radical, on the other hand, is usually a naturally hopeful and enthusiastic individual, profoundly pessimistic about the present, but with a boundless confidence in even the ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... sharp contradictions that abound in the book (cf. e.g., ii. 22 and iii. 22, or iv. 2 and ix. 4, or iii. 16 and iii. 17, or viii. 14 and ix. 2, or iii. 1-9 and iii. 11). The preacher, whose painful experiences and prevailingly pessimistic teachings are the original basis of the book, appears to have been consistent throughout. He ends in xii. 8 with the same refrain, Vanity of vanities; all is vanity! In a divine library like ...
— The Origin & Permanent Value of the Old Testament • Charles Foster Kent
... no match-maker," she said at last, "and so probably my view is unnecessarily pessimistic. But I happened to see Lady Constance just now, and I cannot pretend that she struck me as ...
— The History of Sir Richard Calmady - A Romance • Lucas Malet
... along in a voice rendered husky by much shouting in dirty weather that the fog-banks would be drifting in from the sea before nightfall. And now he had that mournful satisfaction which is the special privilege of the pessimistic. These fog-banks, the pest of the east coast, are the materials that form the light fleecy clouds which drift westward in sunny weather like a gauze veil across the face of the sky. They roll across ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... fiction. Rejecting all authority in religion, politics, science, and art, this school is the reaction from long ages of oppression. The school of nature lent itself to this new movement until at last it reached the pessimistic standpoint ...
— Handbook of Universal Literature - From The Best and Latest Authorities • Anne C. Lynch Botta
... too glad not to love; the point is that when you do love a thing, its gladness is a reason for loving it, and its sadness a reason for loving it more. All optimistic thoughts about England and all pessimistic thoughts about her are alike reasons for the English patriot. Similarly, optimism and pessimism are alike arguments for ...
— Orthodoxy • G. K. Chesterton
... fifty. I was young then and studying law. I was rather sad, somewhat of a dreamer, full of a pessimistic philosophy and did not care much for noisy cafes, boisterous companions, or stupid girls. I rose early and one of my chief enjoyments was to walk alone about eight o'clock in the morning in the nursery ...
— Maupassant Original Short Stories (180), Complete • Guy de Maupassant
... a satisfactory reply to the persons who eke out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting, as the great Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... the same time, we need not close our eyes to the fact that there are observers and even well-wishers of the coloured people who are not so hopeful. By way of giving what may be regarded as the more pessimistic view, take the following passage from an article in the Daily Mail of October ...
— From Slave to College President - Being the Life Story of Booker T. Washington • Godfrey Holden Pike
... the so-called natural school. His subjects of course were national, and not French. Whether his pessimism was national or personal, I have not been able to discover. It seemed to me that he was a pessimistic man dealing with a nation inclined to pessimism, but that had nothing to do with the technical qualities of the man any more than the national peculiarities of Denmark had to do with Thorvaldsen as a ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... and all such pessimistic voices came the glad soul of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose old-fashioned revelling in the situation is the exact counter-blast to Hardy's modernism, and is one of those perennial human things which are ever both new and old. It is not that Stevenson has not seen the other side of life. He ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... of their situation, Frank Merriwell had not given up hope. He was young, and he still believed that all evil things come to an evil end, and all good things eventually triumph. He had not grown cynical and pessimistic. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... time when idle tales Could set your heart aflame; But now the novel nought avails, Philosophy's your game. You talk of SCHOPENHAUER with zest, And pessimistic teaching; Believe me that I loved you best Before ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Volume 102, January 23, 1892 • Various
... 14 Hensey and found a roomful of fellows in excited discussion of the game. There was a disposition on the part of some of the fellows to consider the Claflin contest as good as won, but Jack Innes was more pessimistic. ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... Fleet has come out at last. The Quartermaster-Sergeant, when he meets the ration parties behind the lines that night, announces to a platoon Sergeant that we have won a great naval victory. The platoon Sergeant, who is suffering from trench feet and is a constant reader of a certain pessimistic halfpenny journal, replies gloomily: "We'll have had heavy losses oorselves, too, I doot!" This observation is overheard by various members of the ration party. By midnight several hundred yards of the firing-line know for ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... Reformatory, New York. "Sexuality" (he wrote in a private letter) "is one of the most troublesome elements with which we have to contend. I have no data as to the number of prisoners here who are sexually perverse. In my pessimistic moments I should feel like saying that all were; but probably 80 per cent, would be a fair estimate." And, referring to the sexual influence which some men have over others, he remarks that "there are many men with features suggestive of femininity that attract others to them ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... would not be pleasant," she said. "But you are pessimistic, captain. I have not said I loved you. Do not be alarmed. I was going to say I pitied ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... most accidental or incidental kind. For Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blase or ennuye. He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—unquenchable hope. He has no objectivity. His point of view is almost entirely ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... critics should think rather of how they can effect changes in nature and in society, in order that those impressions may not exist. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic sentiments, but sentiments that are calm, innocent, and joyous, like Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression of these ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... am sure we will get the emeralds. I, Valmont, pledge you my word. But if Mr. Jonas Carter before marriage calls a halt upon the ceremony until your uncle places fifty thousand pounds upon the table, I confess I am very pessimistic about your obtaining control ...
— The Triumphs of Eugene Valmont • Robert Barr
... our affairs were conducted before the war is about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer, working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has come into human affairs; that ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... practical value of their assistance. The German drive of the 27th of May, beginning on the Chemin des Dames, had pushed south to the Marne and westward towards Meaux. The French falling back in haste had maintained their lines intact, but were pessimistic as to the possibility of stopping the enemy advance. On the 31st of May, German vanguard units entered Chateau-Thierry, crossed the river, and planned to secure the bridges. At this moment American machine gunners of the Third Division came up with a battalion of French colonials ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... what I meant to say about the Australian financial outlook. Under the circumstance of the failure of credit, the matter touched me deeply, and was a personal grievance. But he persisted that if I were too pessimistic the article would never see type, and I couldn't have the money. I gave way, and condescended to have hopes about Australia. But even when I got his cheque I was ...
— A Tramp's Notebook • Morley Roberts
... the lively repast of the previous evening. In the best of circumstances breakfast is a pessimistic meal. The world never looks the same as it ...
— Mlle. Fouchette - A Novel of French Life • Charles Theodore Murray
... the poet; for the differences are manifestly changes in the same character, and changes due merely to age. Just as Romeo is younger than Hamlet, showing passion where Hamlet shows thought, so Macbeth is older than Hamlet; in Macbeth the melancholy has grown deeper, the tone more pessimistic, and the heart gentler. [Footnote: Immediately after the publication of these first two essays, Sir Henry Irving seized the opportunity and lectured before a distinguished audience on the character of Macbeth. He gave ...
— The Man Shakespeare • Frank Harris
... at first seem very hopeful; but on second thoughts we see that we are not forced to draw any very pessimistic conclusion from it. The direction of human evolution need not remain always the same. The movement, in fact, of civilization from East to West has now clearly completed itself. The globe has been circled, and we cannot go any FARTHER to the West without coming round to the East again. ...
— Pagan & Christian Creeds - Their Origin and Meaning • Edward Carpenter
... know," said the pessimistic Mr. Duckett. "I wonder whether they'll have another shot for the treasure when they get ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... expostulation with one so incapable of even understanding the mainsprings of his actions? Moreover (he, above all, must not forget it) Rupert had suffered through him in pride and self-esteem. And yet, despite Sir Adrian's philosophic mind, despite his vast, pessimistic though benevolent tolerance for erring human nature, his was a very human heart; and it added not a little to the sadness of his lot at every return to Pulwick (dating from that first most bitter home-coming) to feel in every fibre of his being how little welcome he was where the ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... just then, shaking his head dubiously. He was not going to spend Christmas with Edward and Geraldine, and perhaps the prospect of having to cook and eat his Christmas dinner all alone made him pessimistic. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... of marriage is clearly inside the province of government. That such an argument as is quoted from William Lloyd Garrison can still be circulated in the United States and apparently carry weight, is sufficient cause for one to feel pessimistic over the spread of the scientific spirit in this nation. Suffice it to say that on this point the National Association is ...
— Applied Eugenics • Paul Popenoe and Roswell Hill Johnson
... take a very pessimistic view of the economic position of Great Britain. Mr. Hyndman said that "Great Britain had lost her commercial and industrial supremacy. The United States now stood first, Germany second, and Great Britain was forced ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... not wish to seem, even, to be cynical or pessimistic, but when I look at some of the mental pabulum that our newspapers supply, I cannot but feel that we are making vast efforts to maintain the commonplace ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... Catholic. The former is always screwing himself up to see truth; the latter is often content that truth is there. The Puritan is only strong enough to stiffen; the Catholic is strong enough to relax. Shaw, I think, has entirely misunderstood the pessimistic passages of Shakespeare. They are flying moods which a man with a fixed faith can afford to entertain. That all is vanity, that life is dust and love is ashes, these are frivolities, these are jokes that a Catholic can afford to utter. He knows well enough that there is a life that ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... confirmed them," said pessimistic Trenchard. He wagged his head. "They say the Duke ...
— Mistress Wilding • Rafael Sabatini
... of the past, too much caution cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the development of thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and we ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... prejudice. He could never, in any case, be made to run a machine. He hated the obvious way of saying or doing a thing. He cultivated the "unexpected" almost to a fault, and always gave a touch of originality even to the commonplace. His pessimistic and unhopeful temperament was doubtless due to inherent and hereditary bodily weakness, and to the lack of muscular cultivation in his youth, which might have modified inherent tendencies. His mental lack was form ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... called to make every sacrifice—marriage, ambition, happiness, all must be abandoned: abandoned while I live, not after I have made myself, by years of self-discipline, indifferent to such considerations.... But for its piety, the Imitation is, I think, the most pessimistic book in the world. The Exercises of St. Ignatius (perhaps because he was a saint) produce quite an opposite effect upon me; they exhort us to hope, action, courage. They make one a citizen of both ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... rest because of unbelief," "they limited the Holy One of Israel": in these words the Bible, like the New Thought, traces all the sorrow of the world—that terrible Weltschmerz which expresses itself with such direful influence through the pessimistic literature of the day—to the one root of a false belief, the belief in man's limitation. Only substitute for it the true belief, and the evil would be at an end. Now the ground of this true belief is that clear apprehension of "the Father" which, as I have shown, forms the basis ...
— The Hidden Power - And Other Papers upon Mental Science • Thomas Troward
... well. Or it may be that they take seriously those jeremiads over our decay which are characteristic of our people, and very especially of many of our military thinkers. I have never been able to understand why they should be of so pessimistic a turn of mind, unless it be a sort of exaltation of that grumbling which has always been the privilege of the old soldier. Croker narrates how he met Wellington in his later years, and how the Iron Duke ...
— New York Times, Current History, Vol 1, Issue 1 - From the Beginning to March, 1915 With Index • Various
... expeditiously. By July 1950, the last month of the Fahy Committee's life, the Army had added only seven more specialties with openings for Negroes to the list of forty published seven months before at the time of its agreement with the committee. In a pessimistic mood, Kenworthy confessed to Judge (p. 378) Fahy[14-144] that "so long as additions are not progressively made to the critical list of MOS in which Negroes can serve, and so long as segregated units continue to be the rule, all MOS and schools ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... patients. His opinion should always be sought when symptoms are not understood; but it is not unusual for patients to bring to the doctor's attention many complaints that would pass unnoticed if they taught themselves to restrain the imagination, to refrain from pessimistic reflections, and to divert their thoughts from ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... things is extremely dangerous for the country, inasmuch as we are now breeding mainly from our worst stocks (the feeble-minded are very prolific), while our best families are stationary or dwindling. Without denying the general truth of this pessimistic conclusion,[19] it may be pointed out that the miners are, physically at least, above the average of the whole population, and that the very low birth-rate of residential districts is partly due to the presence in large numbers ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... not yet quite five, but certainly there was darkness enough for his purposes. He could safely take the car into the side wood road near The Cedars, and leave it there among the trees until he needed it. He handed Burke his final offering, the size of which wholly dispelled that philosopher's pessimistic forebodings. Jumping into his car, he backed ...
— The Girl in the Mirror • Elizabeth Garver Jordan
... which might be called his pessimistic month. But he did not take his money and go. He decided that he would wait until he had grown a beard before he ventured. He realized bitterly that he was a fugitive, and that it would go hard with him now if he were ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... it, no doubt. Good, too, Lee Fu, plenty of good. Don't be pessimistic. But I suppose you're right, in a way; the evil always does ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1921 and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... Jesuit Father Castelein(597) impugned the rigorist theory with weighty arguments. He was sharply attacked by the Redemptorist Godts,(598) who marshalled a great number of authorities in favor of the sterner view. The controversy cannot be decided either on Scriptural or traditional grounds. In our pessimistic age it is more grateful and consoling to assume that the majority of Christians, especially Catholics, will be saved.(599) If we add to this number not a few Jews, Mohammedans, and heathens, it is probably safe to estimate the number ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... afterward thought so himself—this editorial was a bit too pessimistic. But he had to write it—had to ease his soul. He set it off, however, by a lovely little paragraph which he printed ...
— The Nine-Tenths • James Oppenheim
... our appreciation of America will depend on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the great social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If we think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, America will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we believe that man's sympathies for others will grow deeper, that his ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... steps which lead from the normal error or regret to the destructive disturbance. Everyone knows persons whose pessimistic temperament makes them inclined to an over-frequent depression, or others whose silly disposition brings out constantly those emotional tendencies which the maniac shows in an exaggerated degree. ...
— Psychotherapy • Hugo Muensterberg
... kept the record of public opinion, and from time to time have invoked the aid of psychometry, which has dissipated every fear and contradicted all the pessimistic notions of politicians and newspaper correspondents ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... prospects in oil?" Judson's tone was pessimistic. "Not a thing doin', Gorry. Awful slow bunch, that lump of nuts I'm in with on this. Mentioned your name to one or two of 'em; but no enterprise. Boneheads that wouldn't know a white man from a crane." That he understood what Gorry understood ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... himself ever on the side of the higher rather than the lower thought, the nobler rather than the baser. He deliberately takes the optimistic rather than the pessimistic view of everything, the helpful, rather than the cynical, because he knows that to be fundamentally the true view. By looking continually for the good in everything that he may endeavour to strengthen it, by striving always to help and never to hinder, he ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... when I was there last summer; but it was not interesting, and I had better have taken the advice of the Music Hall manager, in whose grounds it was held, and have saved my money. His attitude to repousse work was wholly pessimistic, part prejudice against the craft of the metal-worker in itself, but more resentment that florins should be diverted into such a channel away from comic singers and acrobats. Seated at one of the garden tables we discussed ...
— A Wanderer in Holland • E. V. Lucas
... are. He is cold, hard, and selfish. His quarrels are numerous, with the campaign managers of the Armageddon fight, with his own campaign manager of 1920, with the newspaper correspondents. He is habitually pessimistic, and pessimism and magnetism do ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... but he continued to sit at the little table, reveling in the happiness of a man who feels that he has been called to some purpose worth while. His companion hesitated to interrupt his thoughts; her somewhat drab business experience made her pessimistic toward all idealism, and yet she felt that here, surely, was a man who could carry almost any project through to success. The unique quality in him, which distinguished him from any other man she had ever known, was his complete ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... bright new pennies meant nothing to him. He knew nothing about war. Very possibly the prophecies of shortage and restrictions and starvation were, in the proof, to be refuted as a thousand other prophecies of the early days, optimistic and pessimistic, were being refuted. What had that to do with it? Remained the frightful facts that were going on out there in Belgium and in Gallipoli and in Russia. Remained the increasing revelation of Germany's enormous might in war and the revelation of what war was as she conducted ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... sin!" says the Soothsayer to Zarathustra. It will be remembered that in Schopenhauer's ethics, pity is elevated to the highest place among the virtues, and very consistently too, seeing that the Weltanschauung is a pessimistic one. Schopenhauer appeals to Nietzsche's deepest and strongest sentiment—his sympathy for higher men. "Why dost thou conceal thyself?" he cries. "It is THE HIGHER MAN that calleth for thee!" Zarathustra is almost overcome by the Soothsayer's pleading, ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... are these pessimistic doctrines the fruits of Koheleth's own meditations, and how far may they be supposed to reflect the views of the nation which admitted his treatise into its sacred canon? The latter half of this question is answered by the desperate ...
— The Sceptics of the Old Testament: Job - Koheleth - Agur • Emile Joseph Dillon
... waste time in this talk. You display all the confidence of youth in speaking of the exploits you propose, and, indeed, it is cheering for a middle-aged person like myself to meet one so confident of anything in these pessimistic days. But have you considered what will happen if something goes wrong during one ...
— The Sword Maker • Robert Barr
... "We are outrageously pessimistic. There was an excuse at the beginning of the war, when we dropped behind a rock, stunned at the very thought of an Armageddon; then we clapped our hands on our pockets, tightened up our purse strings, and, with white ...
— The Sequel - What the Great War will mean to Australia • George A. Taylor
... Lewis[428] and by Clarendon, the latter standing at the moment in a position midway between the Whig and Tory parties[429]. Yet Russell, with more cause than others to mistrust Seward's policy, as also believing that he had more cause, personally, to resent it, was less pessimistic and was already thinking of at least postponing immediate hostilities in the event of an American refusal to make just recompense. On December 16 he wrote to Palmerston: "I incline more and more to the opinion that if the answer is a reasoning, ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... Raffles in so pessimistic a mood. I did not share his sombre view of either matter, though I confined my remarks to the one that seemed to weigh ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... characteristic, habit after habit. The habit of fault-finding and its opposite are grown in identically the same way; the characteristic of jealousy and its opposite; the characteristic of fear and its opposite. In this same way we grow either love or hatred; in this way we come to take a gloomy, pessimistic view of life, which objectifies itself in a nature, a disposition of this type, or we grow that sunny, hopeful, cheerful, buoyant nature that brings with it so much joy and beauty and power for ourselves, as well as so much hope and inspiration and ...
— What All The World's A-Seeking • Ralph Waldo Trine
... the species. To a mind accustomed to the idea of unity in nature, such a proposition appears utterly indefensible. And yet, improbable and unphilosophical as it is, it has never found a lack of supporters. There always were writers who took a pessimistic view of mankind. They knew it, more or less superficially, through their own limited experience; they knew of history what the annalists, always watchful of wars, cruelty, and oppression, told of it, and ...
— Mutual Aid • P. Kropotkin
... gloomily that it would be just his luck to meet Mrs. Bartlett unexpectedly in the streets of Fort Erie on one of those rare occasions when he was enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. He had the most pessimistic forebodings of what the future might have in store for him. Sometimes, when neighbors or customers "treated" him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent cigar instead ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... Claudius, and Gertrude are manifestly essential: for the theme is the hesitancy of a young man of a certain temperament in taking vengeance upon the seducer of his mother and murderer of his father. But is Ophelia essential, or merely auxiliary? Essential, if we consider Hamlet's pessimistic feeling as to woman and the "breeding of sinners" a necessary part of his character; auxiliary, if we take the view that without this feeling he would still have been Hamlet, and the action, to all intents and purposes, the same. The remaining characters, on the other hand, are clearly ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... convention of the association was held Dec. 14-19, 1915, in Washington, the scene of many which had preceded it, with 546 accredited delegates, the largest number on record. The one of the preceding year had left many of the members in a pessimistic frame of mind but this had entirely disappeared and never were there so much hope and optimism.[99] The Federal Amendment had for the first time been debated and voted on in the House of Representatives, receiving 204 noes, 174 ayes, a satisfactory result for the first trial. ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume V • Ida Husted Harper
... get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... be the Rogers's statuettes of literature. But that day is evidently far off. I do not think that any jester of the older day—the day of Touchstone or of Rigoletto, with a rooted sorrow in his heart, could have been more pessimistic and more hopeless than Mark Twain. To change the words of Autolycus—"For the life to come, I jest out the ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... was yellow—a witness to the fact that his liver was still in him—and he was inclined to take a pessimistic view of life. Peter Walsh paid no attention to his prophecy. ...
— Priscilla's Spies 1912 • George A. Birmingham
... desperate loss when the sun he loves is obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to him he never attended to them—and now he cannot. If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed attention, rather than spineless feeling distractibility, ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... are far from showing that Seneca had the least inkling of a doctrine of the Progress of humanity. Such a doctrine is sharply excluded by the principles of his philosophy and his profoundly pessimistic view of human affairs. Immediately after the passage which I have quoted he goes on to enlarge on the progress of vice. "Are you surprised to be told that human knowledge has not yet completed its whole task? Why, human wickedness has not yet ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... we had nothing to worry over for the present on her score. Our own troubles began when we reached the only hotel and found it crowded. The proprietor, a little wizened, pockmarked Arab in a black alpaca jacket and yellow pants, with a tarboosh balanced forward at a pessimistic angle, suggested that there might be guests in the hotel who would let ...
— Affair in Araby • Talbot Mundy
... seldom seen Marlow so vehement, so pessimistic, so earnestly cynical before. I cut his declamation short by asking what answer Flora de Barral had given to his question. "Did the poor girl admit firing off her confidences at Mrs Fyne—eight pages of close writing—that ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... which had a stream, a grove of trees, great boulders and rocks, and a hill site for the house with a broad outlook, and a railroad station conveniently near. The friend who finally found the place for me had begun his quest with the pessimistic remark that I would better wait for it until I got to Paradise; but two years later he telegraphed me that he had discovered it on this planet, and he was right. I have only eight acres of land, but no one could ask a more ideal ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... being equal to his hopes. He was especially sensitive and discouraged by unforeseen expenditure, while his sanguine partner, Roebuck, on the contrary, continued hopeful and energetic, and often rallied his pessimistic partner on his propensity to look upon the dark side. He was one of those who adhered to the axiom, "Never bid the devil good-morning till you meet him." Smiles believes that it is probable that without Roebuck's support Watt could never have gone on, but that may well be doubted. ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... carrying on a ship-building program with reference to conditions after the war. It is only within ten days that we have realized that the end of the war will be one of defeat unless we build twice as fast as we proposed to build. You know that I am not pessimistic. It is not my habit to look upon the gloomy side of things. It is no kindness to the American people or to France or England to give them words of good cheer now. This war is right at this minute a challenge ...
— The Letters of Franklin K. Lane • Franklin K. Lane
... that subject he considered himself an expert, and regularly twice a week he emptied the smoking-room at Rumfold by showing—with the aid of small flags—what he would have done had he been in charge of the battle of the Somme in 1916. He was only silenced once, and that was by a pessimistic and saturnine Sapper. ...
— Mufti • H. C. (Herman Cyril) McNeile
... rampant. Now, after a few days, that cosmopolitan and rapidly changing population appeared to have buried their differences, and the uninitiated would never have guessed the town had passed, and was, indeed, still passing, through troublous times. Mr. Perkins, however, was pessimistic, and told us appearances were misleading. He rightly foresaw many lean years for those interested in the immediate future of the Rand, though even he, perhaps, hardly realized how lean those would become. Since those days much ...
— South African Memories - Social, Warlike & Sporting From Diaries Written At The Time • Lady Sarah Wilson
... told them very concisely that he would pay them a thousand dollars for the first ear of corn raised in Salt Lake Valley. It is true that Bridger seemed to have become pessimistic in many matters. For one, the West was becoming overcrowded and the price of furs was falling at a rate to alarm the most conservative trapper. He referred feelingly to the good old days when one got ten dollars ...
— The Lions of the Lord - A Tale of the Old West • Harry Leon Wilson
... benefices—together with the charges for seeing the wonders of the Mont—what a trade they did! It is only the Jews, who, in their turn, now own us, up in Paris, who can equal the priests as commercial geniuses!" And our pessimistic Parisian, during the next half-hour, gave us a prophetic picture of the approaching ruin of France, brought about by the genius for plunder and organization that is given to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... that followed was certainly not a pleasant one, for the floor was hard, and sleep was shy of coming to them. With the first glimmerings of daylight, therefore, the two prisoners arose, weary, sore of body, and in a distinctly pessimistic frame of mind which found no amelioration in the fact that hour after hour dragged its weary length along, bringing neither visitors nor food, although the breakfast hour had long passed. Noon arrived, and still no footstep approached the door of their ...
— The Adventures of Dick Maitland - A Tale of Unknown Africa • Harry Collingwood
... own woe," says Barbara, who is a sturdy enemy to all pessimistic thoughts. "Wait a moment, Joyce." She hurries after her and lays her hand on the girl's shoulder. "Will you come with me next Wednesday to ...
— April's Lady - A Novel • Margaret Wolfe Hungerford
... vessel lay in the Pool, and lamenting the good times gone by. When at last his joints grew too stiff, and other troubles of age came upon him, he settled ashore in some little cottage and devoted himself to quiet meditation of a pessimistic kind. Every morning he rolled down to the quay and criticised with cruel acuteness the habits of the younger generation of mariners; every evening he took his place in the tavern parlour and instructed the assembled ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... vainly seeking for the solution of the riddle of the universe, vainly striving after a theory that should reconcile nature's brute law with the human demand for justice and immanent goodness. By original temperament an optimist, he changed and grew pessimistic with the untoward happenings of his agitated career, and under the fostering of his native self-esteem. Possibly too, as Le Breton asserts, a secondary cause was his having imbibed the pretentious doctrines of the Romantic school, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... sing the praises of the austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and the song of ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Selwood that they were face to face with an impossible situation, and he began to feel inclined to share Mr. Halfpenny's pessimistic opinions as to the usefulness of these researches. But Professor Cox-Raythwaite was not to be easily daunted, and he was no sooner baulked in one direction than ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... the "two Stevensons," as they were known, the cousins Robert Louis and Robert Alan Mowbray Stevenson (the author of the recent "Life of Velasquez," and the well-known writer on art), were in Barbizon. It fell that the cousins, in pessimistic vein, were decrying modern art—the great men were all dead; we should never see their like again; in short, the mood in which we all fall at times was dominant. As in duty bound, I argued the cause of the present and ...
— McClure's Magazine, Vol. VI., No. 6, May, 1896 • Various
... a fight And fumin' never pays; There ain't no use in broodin' In these pessimistic ways; Smile just kinder cheerfully Though hope is nearly gone, And bristle up and grit your teeth And keep ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... eighteenth century, and helped to prepare the way for the French Revolution. Among the Italians, too, each man appeals to this noble instinct within him, and though with regard to the people as a whole—chiefly in consequence of the national disasters— judgements of a more pessimistic sort became prevalent, the importance of this sense of honour must still be rated highly. If the boundless development of individuality, stronger than the will of the individual, be the work of a historical providence, not less so is the opposing force which ...
— The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy • Jacob Burckhardt
... enough for most people," says Neilson. "Don't grow pessimistic, Margaret. There is a great deal of light and joy and laughter in the world, and I know no one so framed to enjoy it as yourself, if only you would give yourself full sway. You condemn marriage, yet how can you speak of it with authority—you who ...
— The Hoyden • Mrs. Hungerford
... requires scientific knowledge of this darkest side of human life. Certainly, the indiscriminate reading of vice investigations is dangerous for many young people,—for young men because some of them are allured into personal investigations, and for young women because they get an exaggerated and pessimistic view of all sexual problems. For the intelligent reader who wants the general information that every public-spirited citizen should have, the well-known book by Jane Addams will serve both as an outline and an encyclopedia of the social evil. Social workers and some educators will find ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... improved since she first began to write. Constant communication with Godwin would no doubt have developed her intellect, and the calm created by her more happy circumstances would have lessened her pessimistic tendencies. Moreover, life, just as she lost it, promised to be brighter than it had ever been before. Godwin's after career shows that he would not have proved unworthy of her love. Domestic pleasures were dear to her as intellectual ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... ignorant. But it appears from a letter, which M. Paul Cambon[45] wrote to his Foreign Office on July the 24th, 1914, that Prince Lichnowsky had returned to London from Berlin about a month before and had "displayed pessimistic views as to the relations between St. Petersburg and Berlin." Cambon adds that the English Foreign Office and his other diplomatic colleagues had all been struck "by the anxious appearance of Prince Lichnowsky since his ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... we pass on to other themes, seems a good place to say that we live in a very stupid old world, round like an orange and slightly flattened at the poles. The proof of this seemingly pessimistic remark, made by a hopeful and cheerful man, lies in the fact that we place small premium in either honor or money on the business of teaching. As, in the olden times, barbers and scullions ranked with musicians, ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great, Volume 6 - Subtitle: Little Journeys to the Homes of Eminent Artists • Elbert Hubbard
... was eighteen months old, she had finished it. It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, "O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill. Ignore the maimed ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen
... fashion for almost every woman to carry on her arm a work bag and produce from its depths at any moment without warning something she was making. In the early days the bag was usually highly decorated and the article being made was a luxury. Only a few serious and pessimistic workers had begun to produce plain usefulness and in this particular Mayfair drawing-room "the War" as yet seemed to present itself rather as a dramatic and picturesque social asset. A number of good-looking young officers ...
— Robin • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... thumpings to which the mates had accustomed them; but they were not satisfied with the new order for they could feel that this strange peace was unreal, unhealthful. Aye, the calm before the typhoon. They felt it just as I felt it, just as Nigger felt it. As for pessimistic Nigger, so strictly did he mind his own business these quiet days he was like a dumb man, a silent brown shadow. But he went on ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... mysticism—though Tolstoi has never felt the life of the soul so profoundly as this predecessor. Ibsen passed through the three stages. Huysmans, never romantic, began as a realistic pessimist and ended as a pessimistic mystic. Felicien Rops could never have been a romantic, though the macabre romanticism of 1830 may be found in his designs. A realist, brutal, bitter, he was in his youth; he saw the grosser facts of life, so often lamentable and tender, ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... the collar, as he always did in dealing with the pessimistic skipper. "But we're only fifteen miles ...
— Two on the Trail - A Story of the Far Northwest • Hulbert Footner
... regular editor at first, although the publication of the first three numbers was practically superintended by Smith. Afterwards Jeffrey became editor at a salary of L300. He had previously written some articles (including a critique of Southey's Thalaba) for the Monthly Review and was pessimistic enough to anticipate an early failure for the new venture. However, at the time he assumed control (July, 1803) the circulation was 2500, and within five years it reached 8,000 or 9,000 copies. Jeffrey's ...
— Early Reviews of English Poets • John Louis Haney
... Croak!" replied Hawkins, sourly. "Go on and croak till your dying day, Griggs. If any one ever offers a prize for a pessimistic alarmist, you take my advice and compete. You'll win. I'm going to start the engine and ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... discouragement alone, many give up the quest for knowledge as hopeless, and while too well-balanced to drift into dissipation, they suffer from ennui and become pessimistic. ...
— The New Avatar and The Destiny of the Soul - The Findings of Natural Science Reduced to Practical Studies - in Psychology • Jirah D. Buck
... outlook was too pessimistic; he was an earnest spirit, unafraid to speak his mind and too much a lover of truth to be misled by a love of his country into making exaggerated claims for works by his countrymen. We must not forget that he ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... movement, like every other idealist movement, contains a sprinkling of unpopular pessimistic souls, who drive home, in season and out of season, a few unpopular truths. One of these unwelcome truths is to the effect that the world is not following after the idealists half as fast as they think it ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... of which we are paying the penalty. I cannot refrain from recommending the thoughtful reader a popular, but at the same time, profound treatise on this subject by Claudius[1] which exhibits the essentially pessimistic spirit of Christianity. It is entitled: Cursed is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... been fishing for eels in that pessimistic way peculiar to all fishermen, and seeing the tail-tip waving in the grass, and nothing else, had mistaken the same for his quarry. And this will be the easier to believe because we know, and probably the heron did also, that eels are given at times to overland journeys on secret ...
— The Way of the Wild • F. St. Mars
... backward movements. The rosy afterglow of the classic world was upon these Greek Fathers; but at the same time they suffered from the sorrowfulness of the new religion, which held so many sad and pessimistic elements. ...
— The Development of the Feeling for Nature in the Middle Ages and - Modern Times • Alfred Biese
... not alone of difficulty but of diplomacy as well, to rout out the ranch-hands of the Flying Heart without engendering hostile relations that might bear fruit during the day. This morning Still Bill Stover had more than his customary share of trouble, for they seemed pessimistic. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should be a member of it. In much of his later writing ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... voice—as you might say. He remarked that the last time he saw Miss McLeod she had her beautiful dog with her. That made me suspicious, because from what you told me she always had her dog with her. Then he said her dog must be feeling it very keenly, you remember. I tried him with my pessimistic conclusions to see how he took it. You see, as soon as I saw the dog I put contagious disease out of the question. Natural forces unguided seemed impossible, but natural forces of some nature that we can't yet understand seemed probable. ...
— The Mystery of the Green Ray • William Le Queux
... deed has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... is of a merry heart hath a continual feast,' which shows that if we are truly happy, everything about us will appear brighter and more delightful. Again, it says: 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.' How true this is; you never saw a sour, gloomy pessimistic person who was in real good health, while the one who shows the most gladsome face is either in splendid physical condition or else has risen above his pains and distress in his appreciation of God's blessings. They are always believing that 'it ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... makes me pessimistic about the future of democracy. For democracy is crowd rule, and the crowd is a baby when it isn't a savage. Yet we have no real democracy in this country. We have a slave state, the exploiters and the exploited, the "haves" and the "have ...
— A Dominie in Doubt • A. S. Neill
... girls are to be the men and women of to-morrow, with all the responsibilities of the world resting upon their shoulders? Do we want them to enter upon the duties of life stoop-shouldered, flat-chested, spectacle-eyed? Do we want them to be anaemic, pessimistic, nervous wrecks? Do we want them to be mental weaklings and moral cowards? Do we want them even to approximate these conditions? No? Then, with all our provisions for their wants and their needs, let us be sure to develop those things ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world is perfect"—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. "Imperfection, ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... sinking of hearts as Eustace Hignett moved down the room and took his place at the piano. A pianist! This argued more singing. The more pessimistic began to fear that the imitation was going to be one of those imitations of well-known opera artistes which, though rare, do occasionally add to the horrors of ships' concerts. They stared at Hignett apprehensively. There seemed to be something ominous in the man's very ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... more disposed to hold to their positions, fearing that she carried troops, and meant to land them. Now she was steaming slowly away. How many did our bag amount to? The Intelligence Officer was sanguine, so was my colleague, but the gunnery officer was rather pessimistic. 'Two or three of those rounds went just wrong,' he grunted. 'We've struck a bad day.' After that the porridge and the bacon and the eggs were done with; we were soon back at our stations. Once more our gun bombarded. Once ...
— Cinderella in the South - Twenty-Five South African Tales • Arthur Shearly Cripps
... and the instructor who came to coach her in stage business declared that madame held the future in the hollow of her pretty palm. But the third year letters began to miss. Edna wrote irregularly in pessimistic phrases. Art was so long and life so gray that she felt, thus she assured her husband, as if she must give up everything and return to him. Did he miss her? Why was he cool—above all, patient? Didn't he long for wings to fly across the Atlantic? Then a silence ...
— Melomaniacs • James Huneker
... of seventy-three missionaries that, as a matter of personal experience, sixty-seven cases have wrought only evil, while only fifty-three have been productive of good. The balance is on the wrong side. We must decide, in view of these replies, that there exists in general rather a pessimistic opinion as to the advantages of applying to the yamen ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... doctors of the day as an antidote to the "spirit," and its underground noises. "Are not our ears already full of bad sounds?" say the skeptics, as lovers of repose, and almost as a kind of safety police; "this subterranean Nay is terrible! Be still, ye pessimistic moles!" The skeptic, in effect, that delicate creature, is far too easily frightened; his conscience is schooled so as to start at every Nay, and even at that sharp, decided Yea, and feels something like a bite thereby. Yea! and ...
— Beyond Good and Evil • Friedrich Nietzsche
... himself as most anxious to aid us in Mesopotamia, did not seem satisfied with what his troops in Persia had accomplished, and was concerned at my rather pessimistic views with regard to Kut. Kut actually held out for ten days longer than I had been given to understand was possible at the War Office. He also conveyed to me a pretty clear hint that in his view Major Marsh, ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... Ancient Buddhist Pantheon 2. Zen is Iconoclastic 3. Buddha is Unnamable 4. Buddha, the Universal Life 5. Life and Change 6. The Pessimistic View of Ancient Hindus 7. Hinayanism and its Doctrine 8. Change as seen by Zen 9. Life and Change 10. Life, Change, and Hope 11. Everything is Living according to Zen 12. The Creative Force of Nature and Humanity ...
— The Religion of the Samurai • Kaiten Nukariya
... reform be ordered where shall it begin? Obviously among the teachers themselves. But judging from the estimate each one puts upon himself how shall we reform a thing which is already perfect? On the other hand, if we take the pessimistic attitude that all teachers are wrong will it not be a case of the blind leading the blind, in which instance their destination is definitely determined somewhere in the New Testament. Verily the situation is difficult. Nevertheless it is not altogether hopeless. ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... reports with evident interest. All were in the same pessimistic strain, and he could not know that the money-lender had carefully selected them with a view to the effect he hoped to produce. Edmonds, who saw the interest in Hawtrey's eyes, leaned towards him ...
— Masters of the Wheat-Lands • Harold Bindloss
... documents and methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution wherein ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... heaving in the billows. It was a gloomy company about the wardroom table. Upon each and all hung an oppression of spirit. Captain Parkinson came from his cabin and went on deck. Constitutionally he was a nervous and pessimistic man with a fixed belief in the conspiracy of events, banded for the undoing of him and his. Blind or dubious conditions racked his soul, but real danger found him not only prepared, but even eager. Now his face ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... "You are pessimistic this morning," I returned. "What's the matter, Mrs. Klopton? You haven't used that tone since Euphemia baked a pie for the iceman. What is it now? ...
— The Man in Lower Ten • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... existing organisations in order to build up a more perfect habitation of God through the Spirit? I do not wish to exaggerate. God knows there is no need for exaggerating. The plain, unvarnished story, without any pessimistic picking out of the black bits and forgetting ail the light ones, is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... arms of Rome. No one can fail to be struck by the marked difference between the period from Marathon to the Peloponnesian War and the period from Alexander to Mummius. Philosophy also suffered, and became deeply pessimistic even in the hands of its best and noblest exponents. 'Absence of feeling,' 'absence of care'—such were the ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... are or not," returned the pessimistic youth. "Wait till there's only one piece o' pie left at dinner some day. You'll have ter have it. Marm'll say so. But if you was a boy—an' I could lick ye—ye wouldn't dare take it. ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... was in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living—the whole world was rotten and wrong—and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's Golden Legend, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and liars, and impostors and quackery reigned ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... style, and as he seemed to be really anxious to make things pleasant for me, I shuffled off the pessimistic mood I was drifting into, and fell in with his proposal. The "bull-pen" proved to be a combination reading and lounging-room for the troopers not on duty. My self-appointed host, whose name was Goodell, waved me to a chair, and took one opposite. With ...
— Raw Gold - A Novel • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... a pessimistic humour. He was one of those men who are brave enough on good wine and victuals, but lack the stamina to fight when hungry. He returned presently with the required information. The Plaza de Cadiz was, it appeared, quite close. Indeed, the town of Xeres is not large, though ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... there was no time for being jocular. Some day, perhaps, if he should rise to the dignity of an English classic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' and 'unhealthy.' ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... regard such a view of humanity as grotesquely pessimistic; but there is no doubt that many of us do make of life little more than what the Preacher thought it. It is not only the victims of civilisation who are forced to wearisome monotony of toil which barely yields daily bread; but we see all around us men and women wearing out their ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... as among the white school teachers, referred to above. That there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. Unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. That there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that I agree with the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry in stating that: "I have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism of the man who doubts the capacity of the negro for improvement ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... it operate from the other end? Surely he should not interfere in even so slight a particular with the "Plan of the Creator," who may have been moving "in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" when he gave the supposedly pessimistic bend to my mind. Nay, if my Christian friend do but have the rheumatism, should he not refrain from poulticing himself, lest he throw the celestial machinery out of gear? If changes wrought in religion, science, government, etc., constitute a portion ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... success away from them by their antagonistic manner, and their pessimistic thought. They work for one thing, but expect something else. They don't realize that their mental attitude must correspond with their ambition; that if they are working hard to get on, they must expect prosperity, and not kill their prospects by their ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... of Miss Chris. First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a pessimistic head. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
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