"Pessimism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... said the one thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom. She appealed to him in the tune of an old song. The years and the curses of years had not dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher. He stopped with his hand ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and {454} dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... glad to hear you say so," he said, smiling. "Do you know that to me the most interesting feature of the play was its obvious effect upon this man. Its extreme pessimism is too much paraded, is laid on altogether with too thick a hand to ring true. The thing is an involved nightmare. One feels that as a work of art it is never convincing, yet underneath it all there must be something human, for it found its way into ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... scowling into the mirror. "But then, I knew you would. Your pessimism didn't produce much effect on me. I've heard men talk like that before. And, of course, when a chap gets into the condition you were in, back there, there's no such thing as making him believe he can ever pull out. You talked like an ass, that first ...
— The Lieutenant-Governor • Guy Wetmore Carryl
... not theories but modes of intuition saturated with feelings of worth. We may dispute about them, it is true; we may argue against them or in their defense; but they can neither be established nor overthrown by cogent proofs. It is not only optimism and pessimism, determinism and indeterminism, that have their ultimate roots in the affective side of our nature, but pantheism and individualism, also idealism and materialism, even rationalism and sensationalism. Even though they operate ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... melodies, but his knowledge of harmony, above all, his constructive power, were his best recommendations. As for his abilities as a dramatic poet, absurd! His metaphysics were green with age, his theories as to the syntheses of the arts silly and impracticable, while his Schopenhauerism, pessimism, and the rest sheer dead weights that were slowly but none the less surely strangling his music. When I asked how this change of heart came about, how all that I had supposed that went to the making of the Bayreuth theories was exploded ...
— Old Fogy - His Musical Opinions and Grotesques • James Huneker
... lively than his observation is deep, M. Emile Montegut, writing in the Revue des Deux Mondes, in the year 1860, invents for our author the appellation of "Un Romancier Pessimiste." Superficially speaking, perhaps, the title is a happy one; but only superficially. Pessimism consists in having morbid and bitter views and theories about human nature; not in indulging in shadowy fancies and conceits. There is nothing whatever to show that Hawthorne had any such doctrines or convictions; certainly, the ...
— Hawthorne - (English Men of Letters Series) • Henry James, Junr.
... done!'" Elliott addressed the next clump of waving green blades, pessimism in her voice. "After one row, isn't there another, and another, and another, forever?" She slashed into a ...
— The Camerons of Highboro • Beth B. Gilchrist
... and Charlemagne and the saints and the fight for Jerusalem—from this and the allied world of Danton and Robespierre, and the rush to the Bastille—has driven him back upon a partly well-founded and partly ill-founded Christian pessimism. To him it now seems as if Jerusalem had captured the Christians rather than the Christians Jerusalem. He sees men rushing into Bastilles, not in order to tear them down, but in order to inhabit the ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... to pessimism were reminded that at Lyons, at Amboise, at Paris, and at Compiegne, Francis had already favourably received the representations of the town, and had even told them: "Si vous avez este bien traictez par mes predecesseurs, j'entens et veux vous traicter encore mieux." So that when the King ...
— The Story of Rouen • Sir Theodore Andrea Cook
... self-conceit. An enemy speaking of me now—Dalmaine for example, if he chose to tell the truth—would say that a business life in America has taken a great deal of the humbug out of me. I shall always be rather a weak mortal, shall always be marked by that blend of pessimism and optimism which necessarily marks the man to whom, in his heart, the beautiful is of supreme import, shall always be prone to accesses of morbid feeling, and in them, I dare say, find after all my highest pleasure. Nay, it is certain that Moschus ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... This time it is no embroidered conceit, but one of those lyrics of pure nature music, of which the Renaissance poets were so lavish, touched with the fire of Spring, with the light of hope, bird-notes untroubled by doubt, unconscious of pessimism, which are therefore all the more charming for us who dwell amid sunsets of intense colouring, who can see nothing but the hectic splendours of autumn. For the melancholy nightingale the poet has surprise and ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... elderly single women who become Baedeker tourists, and, having tired of this sort of thing, had concluded to devote her life to the work of the House of Martha. But this was mere idle conjecture. She had spoken, and I should not indulge in pessimism. ...
— The House of Martha • Frank R. Stockton
... discussion lands us in a philosophical cul-de-sac, and nothing is so depressing as a cul-de-sac. The tone is that of the political valetudinarian, watching with uneasy eye the ways of rude health. Unreflecting optimism about Popular Government is sickening, but calculated pessimism ...
— Studies in Literature • John Morley
... hat, and went up to the pa once more. He found August squatted in the midst of a circle of relations. She was entertaining them with one of a series of idealistic sketches of the teacher's domestic life, in which she showed a very vivid imagination, and exhibited an unaccountable savage sort of pessimism. Her intervals of absence had been occupied in this way from the first. The astounding slanders she had circulated concerning the teacher's private life came back, bit by bit, to his ears for a year afterwards, and her character ...
— Over the Sliprails • Henry Lawson
... except those suffering from pessimism, may hope to be benefited by motoring; but pessimism in a mild form often becomes fatally exaggerated by experience with automobiles, ...
— My Friend the Chauffeur • C. N. Williamson and A. M. Williamson
... too much critical facility, finds the cause of Conrad's unyielding pessimism in the circumstances of his own life—his double exile, first from Poland, and then from the sea. But this is surely stretching the facts to fit an hypothesis. Neither exile, it must be plain, was enforced, nor is either irrevocable. Conrad has been back to Poland, and he is free to return to ...
— A Book of Prefaces • H. L. Mencken
... Sir Arthur's pessimism did not keep him from paying Honour a fatherly compliment on her appearance that evening—a compliment accompanied, however, as the jam by the powder, with the reminder that she might be thankful if she ever arrived ...
— The Path to Honour • Sydney C. Grier
... Pangloss, and settled to his own satisfaction that this was the worst of all possible worlds, he held all places to be more or less equally vile. So he had followed Niekerk grumblingly down the mountain pass leading to the Low Country, and had been wasting his pessimism on the desert air of the Crocodile River Valley for several ...
— Reminiscences of a South African Pioneer • W. C. Scully
... nothing but the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms—nay, in the ignoblest form of a fashion—have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which prevails. ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... pluralistic monism. Everything of course is necessarily determined, and yet of course our wills are free: a sort of free-will determinism is the true philosophy. The evil of the parts is undeniable; but the whole can't be evil: so practical pessimism may be combined with metaphysical optimism. And so forth—your ordinary philosophic layman never being a radical, never straightening out his system, but living vaguely in one plausible compartment of it or another to suit ...
— Pragmatism - A New Name for Some Old Ways of Thinking • William James
... of the primitive world-history are suffused in the Jehovist with a peculiar sombre earnestness, a kind of antique philosophy of history, almost bordering on pessimism: as if mankind were groaning under some dreadful weight, the pressure not so much of sin as of creaturehood (vi. 1-4). We notice a shy, timid spirit, which belongs more to heathenism. The rattling of the chains at intervals only aggravates the feeling of confinement that belongs ...
— Prolegomena to the History of Israel • Julius Wellhausen
... other people. Ten brave men would have received the warmest welcome of their lives if they had been there. The coward, being a quartermaster and the assigned head of the boat, sat in the stern and steered. He was terrified, and the women had to fight against his pessimism while they tugged ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... was the outcome of a rare moment of pessimism. In his brighter moods he continued to express unbounded faith in the hens, and was willing to ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... too many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain. We are not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the "scheme of things entire." This is no place for weak pessimism—this universe. This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fine adventure! What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, are insignificant compared with that which may ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... in the light of which to judge and condemn it? How does this bad universe produce an amount of justice and truth and love to be used as a measuring-rod in order to find out whether it will correspond with these ideals or not? That one question seems to me enough to turn pessimism into nonsense. ...
— Our Unitarian Gospel • Minot Savage
... that has caused Buddhism to be called pessimism. Taught, as we have been taught, to believe that life and death are antagonistic, that life in the world to come is beautiful, that death is a horror, it seems to us terrible to think that it is ...
— The Soul of a People • H. Fielding
... to "relief and re-settlement," an item which included the purchase of land and other arrangements for the establishment of suitable British settlers on farms in both colonies. The debate on the vote afforded a significant exhibition of the spirit of mingled pessimism and distrust in which the Liberal Opposition approached every aspect of the South African question. The idea of the Transvaal ever being able to repay this grant-in-aid out of the "hypothetical" development loan appeared ridiculous ...
— Lord Milner's Work in South Africa - From its Commencement in 1897 to the Peace of Vereeniging in 1902 • W. Basil Worsfold
... points, and is written in a sort of lapidary style, that deals in riddles, pathos without object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily. This is better treatment than The Lily and the ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... of society in America. An excellent antidote to the pessimism of modern writers on ...
— Honey-Sweet • Edna Turpin
... is 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 extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. She has avoided the Arian materialism ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... of her manager there is no need to speak; a long experience of famous actresses and singers had not exhausted that expert's capacity for despair. His pessimism gained some color that evening, when Truda had to face a house that was plainly willing to be unsympathetic; applause came doubtfully and in patches, till she gained a hold of them and made herself their master by main force of personality. Monsieur Vaucher, the manager, was still a connoisseur ...
— The Second Class Passenger • Perceval Gibbon
... that most delightful sort of impertinence, which consists in the other person's not seeing it. "You wouldn't be likely to have heard of that yet. It occurred only before dinner to-day. But we have also talked optimism, pessimism, sociology, evolution—Mr. Mayrant would soon become quite—" I stopped myself on the ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... sections of the educated classes to-day, there the general tone of strenuous endeavour has dropped, and the fatal feeling of 'It is not worth while' begins to creep over society. 'Is life worth living?' is the question that is asked on all sides of us to-day. And the modern recrudescence of pessimism has along with it, as one of the main thoughts which cut the nerves of effort, doubt of, and disbelief in, a future. It is because the very little opens out into the immeasurably great, and the passing moments tick us onwards into ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... in the psychic! Cecil Grimshaw's melancholy and pessimism, his love of power, his delight in cruelty, in beauty, in the erotic, the violent, the strange, had vanished! Pierre Pilleux was a humanitarian. Cecil Grimshaw never had been. Grimshaw had revolted ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1921 • Various
... subtilty that is ready to deny life over and over again. He is concerned not with life, but chiefly with religion, and with certain bitter yet altogether lovely colours which evoke for him, and for us too, if we will lend ourselves to their influence, all the misery and pessimism of the end of the Middle Age, its restlessness and ennui, that find consolation only in the memory of the grotesque frailty of the body which one day Jesus will raise up. All the anarchy and discontent of our ...
— Florence and Northern Tuscany with Genoa • Edward Hutton
... incurious generation. Groveling, man knows well; despair is seldom alien; yet these are perversities, no part of man's true lot. The day he wills, he is set on the path to freedom. Too long has he hearkened to the dank pessimism of his "dust-thou-art" counselors, heedless of the ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... severe critic of conventional follies, Thoreau was always a hopeful man; and no finer rebuke to the philosophy of Pessimism was ever given than in these words of his: "I know of no more encouraging fact than the unquestionable ability of a man to elevate his life by a conscious endeavor. It is something to be able to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few ...
— The Story of the Innumerable Company, and Other Sketches • David Starr Jordan
... which"—as Darwin affirmed—"the mind refuses to accept as the result of blind chance," poetry may discover its own new grounds for the attempt. It is easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow. It is even easier to practise a really shallow and devitalising pessimism. The modern annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch beneath the skin of man is neither new nor profound. Neither science nor poetry can rest there; and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to show that spiritual values are not diminished or overwhelmed by the ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... agriculture, engineering, and teaching, all bear testimony to the real interests of American democracy. The ideal was as yet far removed from the fact, and the intellectual leaders of the United States were yet to pass through a period of black pessimism, but the people were still firm in their faith that education is the mainstay of popular government, and gave their full devotion ...
— The New Nation • Frederic L. Paxson
... he forbore to whisper one word in reminder of the old-time pessimism that twenty years ago held the small-headed man of ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... slow, it has never once ceased, and during the last century it has moved on with constantly accelerating speed until to-day the human race stands upon the highest point ever reached. I have absolutely no sympathy with that narrow pessimism which is always talking about "the good old times." All in all, there never was a time in the history of the world when man knew so much as to-day; there never was a time when his life was so ministered to by the forces of nature; never a time when his heart was so tender, when ...
— On the Firing Line in Education • Adoniram Judson Ladd
... like that is her inability to generalize. You women take everything home to yourselves. You try to deduct conclusions from your own lives which men like Schopenhauer have scanned the centuries for. The natural course of your life could hardly have provided you with the pessimism with which—I hope you will pardon my remark, my dear—you have treated me several times in the past few months. Chamfort and Schopenhauer did that. But these are not subjects a man discusses easily ...
— Told in a French Garden - August, 1914 • Mildred Aldrich
... sneer away statements like these. It is easy to laugh them off as "mere pessimism," and to talk of persons with "green spectacles" and "disordered livers." We have learned to know the glad ring of the optimist's patriotic voice. If we all believed this voice, we should all believe that America is the ...
— The Arena - Volume 4, No. 20, July, 1891 • Various
... general rule only within the reach of the few, of the privileged classes and those more or less dependent on their favour, with whom such ideals as those voiced by Winstanley would naturally meet with but scant consideration. Moreover, though we may be accused of pessimism or cynicism for saying so, it seems to us that the main reason why teachings such as Winstanley's must necessarily remain specially unpalatable and unwelcome so long as social and political privileges are ...
— The Digger Movement in the Days of the Commonwealth • Lewis H. Berens
... Few could resist the influence of her personality. Added to this she talked cleverly, and even brilliantly. The tone of her conversation was at times acrid and gloomy. Long years of toil in a hard, unjust world had borne the fruit of pessimism. She was too apt to overlook the bright for the dark side of a picture. But this was a fault which was amply counterbalanced by her talents. For the first time she made friends who were competent to ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... in the character of Homer's heroes. In the first place we have to note their intense vitality and keen sense of pleasure, natural to a young and vigorous people. The outlook on life is generally bright and cheerful, and there is hardly any trace of that corroding pessimism which meets us in later literature. Cases of suicide, so common in ...
— Stories from the Odyssey • H. L. Havell
... creation finished, He looked upon His world, and proclaimed to the waiting seraphim around that 'it was very good.' There is a view of the world which calls itself pious, but is really an insult to God; and the irreligious pessimism that is fashionable nowadays, as if human life were a great mistake, and everything were mean and poor and insufficient, is contrary to the facts and to the consciousness of every man. But if you make ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Isaiah and Jeremiah • Alexander Maclaren
... involuntary evil, that unmerited suffering, that impotent pain,—the human debris of the social process,—which is a challenge to the power of God, and a cry to the heart of man that broods over it in vain, yet cannot choose but hear. In this region the near affinity of realism to pessimism, to atheism, is plain enough; its necessary dealing with the base, the brutal, the unredeemed, the hopeless darkness of the infamies of heredity, criminal education, and successful malignity, eating into the being as well as controlling ...
— Heart of Man • George Edward Woodberry
... Madonna-like beauty. It was dramatized and played at the Vaudeville in 1889, but without much success. 'Le Disciple' is an elaborate attempt to prove that present scientific theories tend to corrupt manners and to encourage pessimism. In 'Cosmopolis,' a study of foreign life in Italy, Bourget shows that the same passions dominate men, whatever ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... he begins further to explore his moral and social nature. The problems of the heart and conscience are infinitely more perplexing than those of the intellect. Has love no future? Has right no triumph? Is the unfinished self to remain unfinished? Again, the alternatives are two, Christianity or Pessimism. But when we ascend the further height of the religious nature, the crisis comes. There, without Environment, the darkness is unutterable. So maddening now becomes the mystery that men are compelled to construct an Environment for themselves. No Environment here is unthinkable. An ...
— Natural Law in the Spiritual World • Henry Drummond
... and his works had not been read and re-read until they have become a common possession of historical students. From a thinker who deemed the time "out of joint," as Tacitus obviously did, and who, had he not possessed great strength of mind and character, might have lapsed into a gloomy pessimism, what noble words are these: "This I regard as history's highest function: to let no worthy action be uncommemorated, and to hold out the reprobation of posterity as a terror to evil words and deeds." The modesty of ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... act, no doubt, whether consciously or unconsciously, from some perception of the misery and uselessness of old age, but the Russian peasants cannot be compared to them. The Stranglers are not moved by any unconscious sentiment. Their belief is the logical application of a doctrine of pessimism, whose terrible consequences they have adopted, although they know not its terminology. What is the life of a moujik worth? Nothing, or nearly nothing. Is it not well, then, to accelerate the coming of deliverance? Let us end the life, and, snapping the chains ...
— Modern Saints and Seers • Jean Finot
... describes the present civilization as a repressive environment. For a great number of its inhabitants a sufficient self-expression is denied. There is, for those who care to see, a deep and growing unrest and pessimism. With the increase in knowledge is coming a new realization of the irrational direction of economic evolution. The economists, however, view economic inequality and life-degradation as objects in truth outside the science. Our value-concept is a price-mechanism hiding behind a ...
— An American Idyll - The Life of Carleton H. Parker • Cornelia Stratton Parker
... followed the footsteps of George Sand and of Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... mistrusted its disinterestedness, contested the quality of its virtue, is possible, even certain. But that he was not personally superior to his heroes I am unwilling to admit. And if I see in his attitude, as in his language, an evidence of his inveterate pessimism, I see in it also a method of protecting his secret thoughts from the ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too warm ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... merely speculative interest in this matter. Bloch has shown good reason for believing that Schopenhauer himself contracted syphilis in 1813, and that this was a factor in constituting his conception of the world and in confirming his constitutional pessimism (Medizinische Klinik, Nos. 25 and ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 6 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... probably no more serious aspect of the popular philosophy which declares so confidently, "There is no will that is not God's will," than that, while professing to be a Gospel of sweetness and light, it in reality plunges us into the very depths of pessimism by making God Himself "ultimately responsible for all the evil and suffering in the world." From such a position, from such premises as these, there is only one step to such conclusions as have been ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... Turkish staff at Shumen, as first dragoman. His plot being discovered, he is arrested and sent to Constantinople; on the way he escapes, but he proceeds to Constantinople and organizes there a company of heiduks. Turkey's entrance into the European concert fills him with pessimism. The Bulgars at Constantinople believe that the civilizing influence of the West will not be in vain. He foresees a more evil despotism masked by the pseudo-liberal manoeuvres of the Powers, and henceforward he joins those Bulgars who agitate from Roumania or from ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 1 • Henry Baerlein
... for the instruction of mothers. She often had heard her father say that a good mother was an exception. She had not believed him—had taken it for granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism. But since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the Children's Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to tell him that she was beginning to ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... propounder of questions, and a smiler at the answers she received. I daresay she used to ask questions—without result—long before she could talk, but I am quite sure she was not embittered by the lack of result. Nothing ever embittered Jay, not even her own pessimism. There is a finality about bitterness, and Jay was never final. Her last word was always on a questioning note. Her mind was always open, waiting for more. "Oh no," she would tell her pillow at night, "there must be a better ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... rather bewildered by so serious a difference of estimate as to the cost of a partnership, but I was inclined to set down Sir Asher's scepticism to that pessimism which is ...
— Ghetto Comedies • Israel Zangwill
... stick upon the ground with a mighty ring of resolution, and the miracle is done. Who would take me for thirty now? From this moment I abjure pessimism and cynicism in all their forms, put from my mind all considerations of the complexities of human life, unravel all by a triumphant optimism which no statistics can abash or criticism dishearten. I likewise undertake to divest myself entirely ...
— The Quest of the Golden Girl • Richard le Gallienne
... I ought to enjoy the joke of what's going on here," I wrote, "but somehow it doesn't amuse me. Pessimism on the contrary possesses me and cynicism deeply engages. I positively feel my own flesh sore from the brass nails in Neil Paraday's social harness. The house is full of people who like him, as they mention, awfully, and with ...
— The Death of the Lion • Henry James
... pessimism? Listen, heart of my heart, I have a new story for you." He moved closer to her, and put his arm round her neck. "There was once a man ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... that something could be done to avert that doom. But whatever his mood, he went on working and scheming furiously. Maybe it was the desperate need to keep himself occupied that drove him, or perhaps it was the pleading he saw in the eyes around him. In the end, determination conquered his pessimism. ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... however, a severe trial to the confidence and the patience of public opinion. Some critics held that the war had been lost in that campaign; but it was a worthier sentiment than pessimism that gave edge to popular feeling against the Government. Official optimism had not concealed the indecisiveness of the Somme, and few had the vision to discern the deferred dividends which accrued as a bonus to other ministers in the spring. But disappointment ...
— A Short History of the Great War • A.F. Pollard
... entirely unimportant occurrence—say, an invitation to a golf foursome which his duties forbid him to accept—a trifle, a nothing, comes along and brings about the explosion, in a fashion excessively disconcerting to the onlooker, and he exclaims, acidly, savagely, with a profound pessimism: ...
— The Plain Man and His Wife • Arnold Bennett
... if the function of philosophy is really, as the saying goes, to give us assurance of God, freedom, and immortality, Mr. Russell's philosophy is a dire failure. In fact, its author sometimes gives vent to a rather emphatic pessimism about this world; he has a keen sense for the manifold absurdities of existence. But the sense for absurdities is not without its delights, and Mr. Russell's satirical wit is more constant and better grounded than his despair. I should be inclined to say of his philosophy ...
— Winds Of Doctrine - Studies in Contemporary Opinion • George Santayana
... Penrod and Sam portended events which, from his point of view, might be unfortunate. Duke had a forgiving disposition, but he also possessed a melancholy wisdom. In the company of either Penrod or Sam, alone, affection often caused him to linger, albeit with a little pessimism, but when he saw them together, he invariably withdrew in as unobtrusive a manner as ...
— Penrod and Sam • Booth Tarkington
... along the line of our absolute certainty as to complete and final victory. The civilian stranger commenced to raise his voice in dissent. We disputed his statements. He then set to work to run through the entire argument of pessimism: America was too far away to be effective; Russia was collapsing; France was exhausted; England had reached the zenith of her endeavour; Italy was not united in purpose. On every front he saw a black cloud rising and took a dyspeptic's ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... baby, and left with Delphy's pessimism ringing in her ears. "He ain' wuth yo' shoestring, he ain'," called the woman ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... advancing the age of marriage because many of the best types of young men pause and consider seriously the impossibility of adjusting a small salary to the ideas of their women friends as to what is the minimum of a family budget. Add to such facts a growing pessimism of young men regarding inconstant affections of wives with children, and the need of special educational attack ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... for happiness—that contentment which accepts the fact that there is a chain of causes linked to effects by an invincible necessity; and that whatever is, could not have wisely been but so. And if this was fatalism, it was at least a brighter thing than the languid pessimism, which would have led her life among quicksands, ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... had cut another piece of cake for Dora. She did not feel able to cope with Davy just then. It had been a hard day for her, what with the funeral and the long drive. At that moment she looked forward to the future with a pessimism that would have done ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Hardy and Meredith; because this parting of the ways to open optimism and open pessimism really was the end of the Victorian peace. There are many other men, very nearly as great, on whom I might delight to linger: on Shorthouse, for instance, who in one way goes with Mrs. Browning or Coventry Patmore. ...
— The Victorian Age in Literature • G. K. Chesterton
... move vigorously through disagreeable facts—organize them into the other facts with which they belong and with which they work—is worthy of consideration. Many of us, who have tried optimism and pessimism ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... wars precisely because they themselves, starved, oppressed, or humiliated from the cradle, have never found life good. Yes, our children can make all the difference between a life full of hope for the future of the race and one of pessimism and despair. It is this sense of children as carrying something of ourselves, our tempers, our hopes, into the future which is at the bottom of what we call the eugenic urge—the desire, that is, to beget good stock and pass on ...
— The Good Housekeeping Marriage Book • Various
... and her soul was hungry to share its bitter secret; nevertheless, she could not do so, for it is often easier to bare our wounds to strangers than to those we love. If her breedings, her bitterness of spirit manifested themselves, it was in a fixed undertone of pessimism and in an occasional outburst of recklessness that ...
— Flowing Gold • Rex Beach
... not cried out, in haste but still in anguish: "Alas! All things are against me; foes are many and friends there are none!" The roads to pessimism are many; but surely this is the shortest one, to get to think that life is but a conflict waged single-handed against great odds, a long story of struggle, difficulties, pains, disappointments, temptations, failures, ...
— Levels of Living - Essays on Everyday Ideals • Henry Frederick Cope
... replied that she was delighted to see that I was beginning to pick up a little. The idea in her mind evidently was that no change had taken place in her but that I was shaking off a mood of irritable pessimism, one of the symptoms of my disease. I did not argue with her though I knew that she was quite wrong. There really was a change in her and I had all along kept a careful ...
— Lalage's Lovers - 1911 • George A. Birmingham
... still the world. Though Jenny might understand, the world would think he had forgotten Jenny. The minority of faithful hearts would grow sadder by his seeming apostasy, and the cynic would strengthen his pessimism by one more illustration of human inconstancy. The world might hear that he was loving Isabel in some Aegean isle, and still deem him faithful; for grief is allowed mistresses, but with a wife it ...
— The Romance of Zion Chapel [3d ed.] • Richard Le Gallienne
... characters of Mr. Hardy's books entered into the mind and memory of his country, compelling many persons, slowly and by degrees—I count myself among this tardy company—to realize their truth, sincerity, and humanity, in spite of the pessimism with which so many of them are tinged; their beauty also, notwithstanding the clashing discords that a poet, who is also a realist, cannot fail to strike; their permanence in English literature; and the greatness of Mr. Hardy's genius! Personally, I would make only one exception. ...
— A Writer's Recollections (In Two Volumes), Volume II • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Merely sentimentalism With a dash of egotism Somewhat mixed with mysticism. Not at all like Socialism, Nor a bit like Atheism, Hinges not on pessimism, Treats of man's asceticism, Quite opposes anarchism. Can't you name ...
— Poems for Pale People - A Volume of Verse • Edwin C. Ranck
... for her pessimism that gloomy autumn, and even Susan, incorrigible old optimist as she was, was hard put to it for cheer. When Bulgaria lined up with Germany Susan only remarked scornfully, "One more nation anxious for a licking," but the ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... al Qaeda, and widespread criminality. Sectarian conflict is the principal challenge to stability. The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... THE PESSIMIST.—With philosophy in general this volume has little to do; but as pessimism is not the doctrine of normal men generally, but is apt to be identified in our minds with the teachings of certain of its leading exponents, it may be well to give, in briefest outline, the type of reasonings upon which the pessimist may take ...
— A Handbook of Ethical Theory • George Stuart Fullerton
... mirror Perry tried on the head and turned from side to side appraisingly. In the dim light the effect was distinctly pleasing. The camel's face was a study in pessimism, decorated with numerous abrasions, and it must be admitted that his coat was in that state of general negligence peculiar to camels—in fact, he needed to be cleaned and pressed—but distinctive he certainly ...
— O. Henry Memorial Award Prize Stories of 1920 • Various
... the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner being, call it ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... have agreed with the philosophy of pessimism that life contains striving and pain, but he would not have shared in the gloom of a Schopenhauer, who in all will sees action, in all action want, in all want pain, who looks upon pain as the essential condition of will, and sees no end of suffering except in the surrender of the ...
— Horace and His Influence • Grant Showerman
... matter of Enoch Peake's?" he asked, hoping and fearing, really anxious for his son. He defended himself against probable disappointment by preparing to lapse into savage paternal pessimism and disgust at the futility of ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... in its wake. During peace the fighting instinct for most men receives satisfaction on a small scale, sometimes in nothing more important than small bickerings and peevishness, or in seeing at first hand or on the ticker a championship prize-fight. The pessimism which many writers have expressed at the possibility of perpetual peace rests in part on their perception of the easy excitability and deep persistence of this impulse, especially among the vigorous ...
— Human Traits and their Social Significance • Irwin Edman
... father had withered his ambitions by his pessimism, a score of ideas had danced through his brain. He had thought of running a buzzer over to the Stevens's bungalow in order that Mrs. Stevens might ring for him when she wanted him; and he had thought of connecting ...
— Ted and the Telephone • Sara Ware Bassett
... to relieve Ukridge. His pessimism vanished. He seldom looked on the dark side of things for long at a time. He began now to speak hopefully of the future. He planned out ingenious improvements. Our fowls were to multiply so rapidly and consistently that within a short ...
— Love Among the Chickens • P. G. Wodehouse
... images, the ideals of a Messianic future and the purest, the most humane conception of life, alternate with sublime descriptions of nature and the sweet strains of love-poems, with national songs breathing hope, or trembling with anguish, and with the dull tones of despairing pessimism and the divinely inspired hymns of an exalted theodicy—all blending to form what the reverential love of men has named the Book ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... that, and forced conviction upon him. It told him so much of that which no man should believe until it be thrust upon him overwhelmingly by the bitter experiences of life. His whole brain was permeated by a pessimism forced upon him by a morbid introspection, resulting from an undue appreciation of his own physical ...
— The Law-Breakers • Ridgwell Cullum
... labor monopolists. Each is working unconsciously in obedience to a natural law; and the only reason that almost every man is not engaged in forming or maintaining a similar monopoly is that he is not placed in similar circumstances. Away, then, with the pessimism which declares that the prevalence of monopolies evidences the decay of the nobler aspirations of humanity. The monopolies of to-day are a natural outgrowth of the laws of modern competition, and they are as actually a result of the application of steam, ...
— Monopolies and the People • Charles Whiting Baker
... PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... English utterance of what Sainte-Beuve, I think, called "the discouraged generation of 1850." Now mere discouragement, except as a passing mood, though extremely natural, is also a little contemptible—pessimism-and-water, mere peevishness to the "fierce indignation," mere whining compared with the great ironic despair. As for Consolation, which in form as in matter strongly resembles part of the Strayed Reveller, I must say, at the risk ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... in her pessimism; the skating season was over. Every girl in the School regarded the dull weather almost as a personal insult, and every teacher in the School realized that the most difficult weeks of the year had now to be faced, for unless precautions were taken, sickness and mischief were bound ...
— Judy of York Hill • Ethel Hume Patterson Bennett
... far back as 1800.] is connected with the previous plays by its emphatic defence of individuality and its statement of the imperative necessity of developing it; but the tone is sunny, and without a tinge of pessimism. It is in some respects the reverse of Rosmersholm; the bitterness of restrained and balked individuality, which ends in death, being contrasted with the sweetness of emancipated and gratified individuality, which leads to health and peace. To the remarkable estimate ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... third answer would seem the plain one: something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a compromise, it not ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... poet describes the nothingness of man in the face of the vast world. The lot of the Hamlets and of the Renes is more enviable than that of the "Mourner" of the ghetto. They at least taste of life before becoming a prey to melancholy and delivering themselves up to pessimism. They know the charms of living and its vexations. The disappointed son of the ghetto lays no stress on gratifications and pleasures. In the name of the supreme moral law he sets himself up ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... was better than Shakespeare was not himself, but Bunyan. And he justified it by attributing to Bunyan a virile acceptance of life as a high and harsh adventure, while in Shakespeare he saw nothing but profligate pessimism, the vanitas vanitatum of a disappointed voluptuary. According to this view Shakespeare was always saying, "Out, out, brief candle," because his was only a ballroom candle; while Bunyan was seeking to light such ...
— George Bernard Shaw • Gilbert K. Chesterton
... imaginations and expressions is a burden and not a support in reference to the creed with which his name is associated. What heathenism has ever approached the horrors of this conception of human destiny? It is not an abuse of language to apply to such a system of beliefs the name of Christian pessimism. ...
— The Autocrat of the Breakfast-Table • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. (The Physician and Poet not the Jurist)
... what you call pessimism," Lorne rejoined. "I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world. and the ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... organist"; and before he has done, the memory masters him, and the pedestrian blank verse breaks into a hymn "rough, rude, robustious, homely heart athrob" to Pym the "man of men." Or he calls up Bernard Mandeville to confute the formidable pessimism of his old friend Carlyle—"whose groan I hear, with guffaw at the end disposing of mock—melancholy." Gerard de Lairesse, whose rococo landscapes had interested him as a boy, he introduces only to typify an outworn way of art—the mythic ...
— Robert Browning • C. H. Herford
... for Butterfly; now for Chwang—and to introduce you to some of his real thought and teaching. You will not have shot so wide of the mark as to see in his story of the skull traces of pessimism: Chwantse had none of it; he was a very happy fellow; like the ...
— The Crest-Wave of Evolution • Kenneth Morris
... miner who had made this lucky strike, told in simple words of his long and solitary quest, when ill-luck had risen with him at the dawn and misfortune had stalked beside him as he drifted and drank from camp to camp, while the gloom of a settled pessimism soured him, and men began to shun him because of the evil that seemed to follow ...
— The Barrier • Rex Beach
... part this stand is taken by the intellectuals in all modern countries. In us of to-day, of this very hour, the wave of Eternity has broken, throwing nothing at our feet but froth. The literature of the past ten years is soaked in the pessimism of those who regret that this should be all that the travail of Time could produce ...
— The Conquest of Fear • Basil King
... sophisticated and complex man. His letters reveal him as remarkably creative, fascinated by the arts, principled, religious and devoted to his father. He had an energetic personality that was almost completely devoid of any cynicism, pessimism or discouragement from creating music. While rumors suggest that he was a lascivious individual, there is no evidence of this at all in his letters. Quite the contrary, the evidence seems overwhelmingly to suggest the opposite, ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... gross materialism, of asceticism and of sensuousness, of over-weening arrogance when it identifies the human self with the universal self and merges man in the Divinity and the Divinity in man, and of demoralizing pessimism when it preaches that life itself is but a painful illusion, and that the sovereign remedy and end of all evils is non-existence. Its mythology is often as revolting as the rigidity of its caste laws, which condemn millions of human beings to such social abasement that their very touch—the very ...
— Indian Unrest • Valentine Chirol
... Pessimism, something akin to consternation, found a hold upon the mental outlook of the troops in the sector. They had held an extraordinary unshakeable faith in the might of the Army, in its absolute certainty of holding impregnable ...
— Norman Ten Hundred - A Record of the 1st (Service) Bn. Royal Guernsey Light Infantry • A. Stanley Blicq
... at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; under another, simple demonology; under another, a mere ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... that such pessimism was ill-founded. Other factors were at work within the Army in 1950, particularly after the outbreak of war in Korea.[14-146] Davenport alluded principally to the integration of basic training centers and the assignment of greater numbers of black inductees ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... of 1890, this Hispano-Filipino Association gave a largely attended banquet at which there were many prominent speakers. Rizal stayed away, not because of growing pessimism, as Retana suggests, but because one of the speakers was the same Becerra who had feared to act when the outrage against the body of Rizal's brother-in-law had been reported to him. Now out of office, the ex-minister was again bold in words, ...
— Lineage, Life, and Labors of Jose Rizal, Philippine Patriot • Austin Craig
... a mad activity which they mistake for achievement. In Romantic melancholy he looked wistfully back by contrast to periods when 'life was fresh and young' and could express itself vigorously and with no torturing introspection. The exaggerated pessimism in this part of his outcry is explained by his own statement, that he lived in a transition time, when the old faith was (as he held) dead, and the new one (partly realized in our own generation) as yet 'powerless to be born.' Arnold's poetry, therefore, is to be viewed as largely the expression, ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... of Dickens was "A Tale of Two Cities." And the greatest failure of Mark Twain is his "Joan of Arc." But Dickens redeemed himself in a hundred ways, while Mark Twain sank deeper and deeper into coarseness and pessimism. As Mark Twain is by all odds apparently the national American author, it is heresy to say this; and I know persons who have assumed an air of coldness as long as they could in my presence, because I declined to look on "Joan of Arc" ...
— Confessions of a Book-Lover • Maurice Francis Egan
... They talked of dykes and windmills and cigars, the history of Holland and its constitution, the constitution of the United States and the edifying spectacle of the politics of that blessed country. They talked of political economy and pessimism and cattle rearing, the state of agriculture in England, the foreign policy of the day, Anarchism, the President of the French Republic. They would have talked of bi-metallism if they could. People hearing them would have thought them ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... conquered from Chaos and Nothing and see the darkness receding on the limits of the horizon. There can be no excess to love, none to knowledge, none to beauty, when these attributes are considered in the purest sense. The soul refuses limits, and always affirms an Optimism, never a Pessimism. ...
— Essays, First Series • Ralph Waldo Emerson
... way upon the Prime Minister, have aroused the greatest concern and the deepest indignation in Ireland," he said. "Mr. Asquith stands to-day, as before the war, high in the confidence of the Irish people." The "persistent pessimism" had effected nothing except to help in some measure "that little fringe which exists in Ireland as in England, of men who would if they could interfere with the success ...
— John Redmond's Last Years • Stephen Gwynn
... dried-up channel they now occupied; over their tops hung the faded foliage of a few dust-laden trees, struggling hard for life with the energy of despair against depressing circumstances. It was a picture that gave Guy a sudden attack of pessimism; if THIS was the El Dorado towards which he was going, he earnestly wished himself back again once more, forgery or no forgery, among the breezy green fields of ...
— What's Bred In the Bone • Grant Allen
... is another. A society has to be old before it becomes critical, and it has to become critical before it can take pleasure in the reproduction of its incongruities by an instrument as impertinent as the indefatigable crayon. Irony, scepticism, pessimism are, in any particular soil, plants of gradual growth, and it is in the art of caricature that they flower most aggressively. Furthermore they must be watered by education—I mean by the education of the eye and hand—all of which things take time. The soil must be rich too, the incongruities ...
— Picture and Text - 1893 • Henry James
... darkness!" He repeated the stranger's words. "For most of us there's been one woman who was all of that. If she fails us——" He stifled his pessimism. "When stars fail, ...
— The Kingdom Round the Corner - A Novel • Coningsby Dawson
... very lowest and worst. He regards himself as simply born to be robbed and oppressed. Yet is he so mild and uncomplaining and unassuming about it all that no one, even the most persistent robber and oppressor, could ever find it in his heart to do him down. But even so his pessimism and readiness to be done are such that he must make it very hard for people to spare him sometimes. I have this story from our local banker, who was called upon by the Income Producer Company, Limited (of some ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... to God the acts of expiation which the sins of France required, and that when the number of these acts of expiation should be large enough, God would smite France no more. What a harsh belief in the necessity of chastisement! What a ferocious idea born of the gloomiest pessimism! How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... self-conscious glumness; the willful making the worst of things (in themselves pretty bad, I admit), that mark the novels of eminent moderns who thrive on their inexpensive pessimism, and have a name as Psychologues! Ohe, les Psychologues! Does anyone suppose that Stevenson could not have dipped his pencil in squalor and gloom, and psychology, and "oppositions of science falsely so-called," as St. Paul, in the ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson - Swanston Edition - Vol. 1 (of 25) • Robert Louis Stevenson
... own way and in their own sphere to discover it, are making very satisfactory headway without raising any of the desperate questions of metaphysics as to its ultimate nature. For them it is not likely to matter for a long time to come whether Optimism or Pessimism, Materialism or Idealism, or none of them, be true. In any case the principles they establish are valid. Physical relations always remain true; "ginger will be hot i' the mouth, and there will be more cakes and ale." It is only when the sciences break down ...
— Browning as a Philosophical and Religious Teacher • Henry Jones
... unheard of thing that five hundred men should overcome eight times their number and that without raising a disturbance in so closely packed a city as Frankfort, where, as the Empress had said, the state of tension was already extreme. But although he found that the pessimism of the Empress regarding his project was affecting his own belief in it, he set his teeth resolutely and swore that if it failed it would not be through lack of taking any precaution ...
— The Strong Arm • Robert Barr
... confession of Maupassant. To those who come after him he leaves the legacy of his highest thought; then he says farewell to all that he loved, to dreams, to starlit nights, and to the breath of roses. "Sur l'Eau" is the book of modern disenchantment, the faithful mirror of the latest pessimism. The journal written on board ship, disconnected and hasty, but so noble in its disorder, has taken a place forever beside Werther and Rene, Manfred ...
— Une Vie, A Piece of String and Other Stories • Guy de Maupassant
... so? I am not at all sure that it would not prove our greatness if the thought of all the helpless pain and drudgery of the world, the drift of falling tears, were so intolerable to us that we simply could not endure the thought; but I think that would end in quixotism and pessimism of the worst kind, if one would not eat or drink, because men starve in Russia or India, if one would not sleep because sufferers toss through the night in pain. That seems ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... muddy," retorted Joey with dogged pessimism. They trooped off after him, each one lighter hearted in spite of a dull reluctance, simply because Colonel Grand had brought not only the sunshine but ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... which I remember: "There are some who declare that Canada's trade is declining; there are some who maintain that the rich glow of health which at present mantles o'er Canada's virgin cheek will soon be replaced by the pallid hues of the corpse. To such pusillanimous propagandists of a preposterous pessimism, I answer, Mr. Speaker with all confidence, never! never!" As a rhetorical effort this is striking, though there seems a ...
— The Days Before Yesterday • Lord Frederick Hamilton
... surroundings, which exaggerated its troubles, which plunged into foolish alarms, previsions of evil, despairing presentiments, which looked upon its terrors as realities, and was constantly lost in the pessimism of that species of delirium, at the end of which it could find nothing but this ejaculation and this phrase: "Bah! ...
— Germinie Lacerteux • Edmond and Jules de Goncourt
... their short skirts, with legs dangling in the gulf. On the other side, seething masses howling worship of the Goddess of Unreason. Cross the gulf—one would metaphorically be torn to pieces. Remain—no outlet for energy but playing the wild Cassandra. Her pessimism was Tartarean. ...
— The Mountebank • William J. Locke
... interest in things which comes from over-fatigue. The most interesting occupation palls on us when we are fagged, or when our vitality is low from derangement of health. A case of indigestion may sweep us out of our usual cheery mood into a mood of discouragement and pessimism. Frayed nerves and an ill-nourished or exhausted brain are ...
— The Recitation • George Herbert Betts
... hand, he felt his goodwill grow weak. Like all those who belong to worn-out generations, he must have been disgusted with action and the villainies it involves. Just before great catastrophes, or just after, there is an epidemic of black pessimism which freezes delicate souls. Besides, he was ill—a favourable circumstance for a disappointed man if he entertains thoughts of giving up the world. In the fogs of Milan his chest and throat became worse and worse. And then it is likely enough that he was not succeeding better as rhetorician ...
— Saint Augustin • Louis Bertrand
... instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what he does not believe in, is a purely literary ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... army, prophesied mischance in the future, produced its effect not so much through an apparently objective but gloomy depiction of life in the garrisons, as through the nourishment that it gave to the torturing doubts which during the last decades of the nineteenth century grew rank as a fatalistic pessimism. The very principle of naturalism as a form of art, with its one-sided preference for disease, crime, and weakness, flourished on the offal of a materialistic philosophy of life, which viewed the vanity of existence with weary resignation. But this disease of the times was as little a ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... them, he saw no inconsistency in bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny, his credulity regarding ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... and Paul on his left; near Schrotter was Barinskoi and a friend of Dorfling's, named Mayboorn. This man was, like Dorfling, a Rhinelander, he combined a successful career as a writer of comic verses with a confirmed pessimism. When he had written one of his merriest couplets, he would stop his work and sigh with Dorfling over the tragedy of life. The papers treated his farces as rubbish, but the public adored them. The earnest critic would hardly touch his name with a pair of tongs, but the theatre managers ...
— The Malady of the Century • Max Nordau
... then she said: "I am glad you think me an optimist. It seems to me that healthy human nature revolts from pessimism. The work that lasts is the work that cheers. Give us something with hope in it—something that appeals to the best part of us—something which, while we read, puts us in touch with fine ideals, and makes us ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... commonly realized, and health is intimately connected with mental attitude, and oftentimes is at the foundation of religious and moral development. 'Hypochondriacal crotchets' are often the product of dyspepsia, and valetudinarianism and pessimism are not unrarely found together. 'Alas,' says Carlyle, 'what is the loftiest flight of genius, the finest frenzy that ever for moments united Heaven with Earth, to the perennial never-failing joys of ...
— No Animal Food - and Nutrition and Diet with Vegetable Recipes • Rupert H. Wheldon |
