"Pessimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... over the sorrows and sufferings of mankind, and views with an unutterable grief the dismemberment of Christendom, he refuses to style himself a pessimist. There is much good in the world; he is continually being astonished by the goodness of individuals; he cannot bring himself to despair of mankind. Ah, if he had only kept himself in that atmosphere! But "it is very hard ...
— Painted Windows - Studies in Religious Personality • Harold Begbie
... religious movements that have occurred within my memory—in several of which I have taken part—and I shall note also the changes for better or worse that I have observed. If as an optimist I may sometimes exaggerate the good, and minimize the evil things, it is the curse of a pessimist that he can travel from Dan to Beersheba and find ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... of the above-stated methods of thought, the Buddhist was of necessity a pessimist; the Greek only less so; while the Jew and the Christian could alone be thoroughgoing optimists. The Buddhist ever asserts the is-not; the Greek, the is; while the Jew and Christian demand the ought-to be, as ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... the elements of which are thus mixed with pity and terror, goodness and beauty, he held himself, like the majority of men, as neither optimist nor pessimist. "The world is neither so good, nor so bad, as it conceivably might be; and as most of us have reason, now and again, to ...
— Thomas Henry Huxley - A Character Sketch • Leonard Huxley
... pessimistic pronouncements," you say. Well, no, not exactly. For, after all, we must never shut our eyes to the actual; and in the world as it is, meliorism, not optimism, is the true opposite of pessimism. Optimist and pessimist are both alike in a sense, seeing they are both conservative; they sit down contented—the first with the smug contentment that says "All's well; I have enough; why this fuss about others?" the second with the contentment of blank despair ...
— Post-Prandial Philosophy • Grant Allen
... something far blacker than any mere bad government. He went not to a prison but to a factory. In the musty traditionalism of the Marshalsea old John Dickens could easily remain optimistic. In the ferocious efficiency of the modern factory young Charles Dickens narrowly escaped being a pessimist. He did escape this danger; finally he even escaped the factory itself. His next step in life was, if possible, even more eccentric. He was sent to school; he was sent off like an innocent little boy in Eton collars to learn the rudiments ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... retorted hotly. "A pessimist's a man that sees nothin' but the bad, and says there's no help for it and won't raise a hand: he's a proper sour-belly. An optimist's a man that sees nothin' but the good, and says everything's all right; let's have a good time. ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... they did splendid work, as by means of the FISH DAINTIES (the title of the book) they popularised the use of fish. Now, it is greatly to be regretted that this firm no longer exists, because if ever there was a venture which deserved support, it was surely this. But I am no pessimist in these matters, and verily believe that before long this company, or one similar, will be in full swing again, and that the public will thereby benefit in every conceivable way. As far as Sydney is concerned there is a different state of affairs, and it is with genuine ...
— The Art of Living in Australia • Philip E. Muskett (?-1909)
... needs a pessimist and an optimist, with ample opportunities to quarrel. Johnson is a jackass, but honest. He is a pessimist and has a pea-green liver. Listen to him and the business will die painlessly, by inches. Applerod is also a jackass, and I presume him ...
— The Making of Bobby Burnit - Being a Record of the Adventures of a Live American Young Man • George Randolph Chester
... is a pure freak in poetry. Perhaps it might be asserted of James Thompson, without too much casuistry, that he was, poetically speaking, not a materialist but a pessimist, and that the strength of his poetic gift lay in the thirst of his imagination for an ideal world in which his reason would not permit him to believe. One cannot say of him, as of Coleridge, that "his unbelief never touched his heart." It would be nearer the truth ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... His heroes are mostly men engaged in a quest for the joys of life, but never attaining whole-hearted enjoyment, because of their innate streak of world-weariness. When the hero of his Anatol (1893) calls himself "light-hearted pessimist," Schnitzler creates a term which fits as well his Fedor in Maerchen (1894), his Fritz in Liebelei (1895), and other specimens of a type related to the heroes of Musset and other Frenchmen. His women, too, have a streak ...
— The German Classics, v. 20 - Masterpieces of German Literature • Various
... pessimist,' Christina said. 'I used to dae a bit in that line masel'. Ma favourite motto was: "Cheer up—ye'll soon be deid!" But I got past ...
— Wee Macgreegor Enlists • J. J. Bell
... improvised much; but they are interesting, as they usually treat of homely topics (Poesias completas: El arpa del amor, 1891; Hogar y patria, 1891; Leyendas, 1898; Flores del alma; Recuerdos y esperanzas, 1899, Garnier, Paris). The romantic pessimist, Manuel Gutierrez Najera (d. 1888), was tormented throughout life by the vain quest of happiness and the thirst of truth. His verses, which are often elegiac or fantastic, are highly admired by the younger generation of Mexican poets. In a letter to the writer ...
— Modern Spanish Lyrics • Various
... the few worldly possessions he now has. Nay, many would foresee for the Indian, through the consummation of his enfranchisement, naught but gloom and sorest plight. These would invest their picture with the sombrest hues; and, making this assume, under their pessimist delineation, blackest Tartarean aspect, would crown it with the exhibition of the Indian, as one sunken, at the instance of the white, in extremest depths of human sorrow; as plunged, engulphed, and detained in a horrible ...
— A Treatise on the Six-Nation Indians • James Bovell Mackenzie
... "You're an old pessimist," exclaimed Earl lightly. "Good boy, Jacques," he cried as the young Frenchman came within hearing. "I knew you'd fix ...
— Fighting in France • Ross Kay
... Christians he was a pessimist about this world and an optimist about the next; for that is usually the state of mind of those who labour under any material or bodily disability, from slavery, which is the worst, to ...
— Stradella • F(rancis) Marion Crawford
... That he is a pessimist in the colloquial sense admits of little question. Nor is it surprising; it is rather difficult not to be. Not a few persons are pessimists and won't tell. They preserve a fair exterior, but secretly hold that ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... the maple sap in Bennington, the budding of the pussy willows along Main Street in Syracuse, the first chirp of the bluebird, the swan song of the Blue Point, the annual tornado in St. Louis, the plaint of the peach pessimist from Pompton, N. J., the regular visit of the tame wild goose with a broken leg to the pond near Bilgewater Junction, the base attempt of the Drug Trust to boost the price of quinine foiled in the House by Congressman Jinks, the first tall poplar struck by ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... little comparison between himself and Meredith. Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great man ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... seven verses of this discourse, I cannot help seeing a gentle allusion to Schopenhauer's habits as a bon-vivant. For a pessimist, be it remembered, Schopenhauer led quite an extraordinary life. He ate well, loved well, played the flute well, and I believe he smoked the best cigars. What follows is ...
— Thus Spake Zarathustra - A Book for All and None • Friedrich Nietzsche
... his eyes must be in fact greater, and not, as may perhaps be the case, only more vividly perceived, than those of the bygone ages. A call to repentance easily takes the form of an assertion that the devil is getting the upper hand; and we may hope that the pessimist view is only a form of the discontent which is a necessary condition of improvement. Anyhow, the diametrical conflict of prophecies suggests one remark which often impresses me. We are bound to call each other by terribly hard names. ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the flock, who reveals ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... the tests of fortitude and endurance to a man of spirit, that were involved by the visitations of "Commissioners," with their fore-ordained mission of lowering Dick's rents, rents that, in Dick's opinion, were already philanthropically low. Major Talbot-Lowry, like many of his tribe, though a pessimist in politics, was an optimist in most other matters, and found it impossible to conceive a state of affairs when he would be unable to do—approximately—whatever he had a mind for. At the age of fifty-eight, fortitude and endurance ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... from the west and has had heavy weather. He asks about the roads east. Gibb Ogle, our leading pessimist, hastens to inform him that very likely the roads are impassable, because the Highway Commissioners have been improving them. Out our way road improvement consists of tearing the roads out with a scraper and heaping them up in the middle. ...
— Homeburg Memories • George Helgesen Fitch
... I know? I can no more tell you the whys and wherefores of myself than I can lift myself up by the waistband and carry myself into the next county, as some one challenged a speculator in perpetual motion to do. I am too much a pessimist to respect my own affections. Do you know what ...
— An Unsocial Socialist • George Bernard Shaw
... a reason for the faith that is in them, and hence it is necessary, in opening any discussion such as he had provoked, that he should assign some ground of opposition or support—Christian, Pagan, utilitarian, constitutional, optimist, or pessimist. ...
— History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880. Vol. 2 (of 2) - Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens • George Washington Williams
... sovereign (net) for entrance fee— And Nibbs is on the list Of patrons who support a free Impartial pessimist; Yet shall his faith not wholly burst; He shares, in common with his "Cap'n," The view that, when we reach the worst, Then nothing worse ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 146, February 11, 1914 • Various
... a pessimist about things as they are, like any good revolutionist. You believe that you are going to improve life at Castro. You alone?" "I, ...
— Caesar or Nothing • Pio Baroja Baroja
... tell you," said Happy as he gazed contentedly into the coals over which the hog had been roasted in sections, "that those who look hard generally discover, that is, 'seek and ye shall find.' It's the optimists who arrive. Your pessimist quits before he comes to the apple trees, or before he reaches the thicket that conceals the fine fat pig. As for me, I'm always an optimist, twenty-four carats fine, and therefore I'm the superior of ...
— The Tree of Appomattox • Joseph A. Altsheler
... upon us to keep step with Joy and Gladness, as we march confidently down the white road which leads to the Land of our Desire. God made every young thing to be happy. He put joy and harmony into every little creature's heart. Who ever saw a kitten with a grouch? Or a little puppy who was a pessimist? But you have seen sad children a-plenty, and we are not blaming the Almighty for that either. God's plans have been all right, but they have been badly interfered ...
— In Times Like These • Nellie L. McClung
... length of the war and its seriousness. In all wars nations are apt to minimize their dangers and the duration. Men, after all, see the power of their own country; they cannot visualize the power of the enemy. I have been accounted as a pessimist among my friends in thinking the war would not be over before Christmas. I have always been convinced that the result is inevitably a triumph for this country. I have also been convinced that that result ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Macaulay. And his placid, retrospective, optimistic strain pleased a public that were excited and harrowed by the mocking and lamenting of Lord Byron, and, singularly enough, pleased even the great pessimist himself. ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... being rebuked by a pessimist replied, "How can you who revile me consent to speak by my machinery? Permit me to reduce you to nothingness and then we will discuss the matter." Moral. You should not look a ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Maisie Ward
... cannot really divest themselves of religion, or even of dogma. When Jesus said that people should not only live but live more abundantly, he was dogmatizing; and many Pessimist sages, including Shakespear, whose hero begged his friend to refrain from suicide in the words "Absent thee from felicity awhile," would say dogmatizing very perniciously. Indeed many preachers and saints ...
— Preface to Androcles and the Lion - On the Prospects of Christianity • George Bernard Shaw
... and professionally cheerful person is very depressing. The pessimist always has wit, for wit reveals itself in the knowledge of values. And the individual who accepts what Fate sends, and undoes Calamity by drinking all of it, is sure to have a place ...
— Little Journeys to the Homes of the Great - Volume 14 - Little Journeys to the Homes of Great Musicians • Elbert Hubbard
... passed warped and scorched and cracked this mighty compound, but without destroying it. A glimpse of this experience which transformed the powerful, joyous, bright-visaged singer into a bitter, darkly brooding pessimist, fleeing from the sinister shadow which threatened to overtake him, is afforded us in the ...
— Essays on Scandinavian Literature • Hjalmar Hjorth Boyesen
... easily done," responded Dunham consolingly. "Just let Thinkright give me an axe, and I'll tickle that old pessimist's ribs until its eyes fly open and it giggles from its roof to ...
— The Opened Shutters • Clara Louise Burnham
... stretch of time and observe the mighty changes which have come within our movement; when we hear the reports of the awakening of men and women to the justice of our cause all the way around the world, I am sure that there is no pessimist among us who does not realize that at last the tide of ...
— The History of Woman Suffrage, Volume VI • Various
... sensations but he doesn't care. In the morning he canters back in, pleased and happy, for breakfast, and he basks in the sun, blinking sagely, the rest of the day. And we say, with respect, "A great pessimist; he thinks life ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... watchmaker was happy. He was a millionaire-baiter by nature and a pessimist by trade. Kenwitz would assure you in one breath that money was but evil and corruption, and that your brand-new watch needed cleaning and ...
— Strictly Business • O. Henry
... volume, disengages the same atmosphere—the atmosphere of a London November, when mere existence is a sufficient burden, and the little miseries of life loom up through the fog into a vague and formidable grotesqueness. Here, for once, is a pessimist whose philosophy is mere sensation—and sensation, after all, is the one certainty in a world which may be well or ill arranged, for ultimate purposes, but which is certainly, for each of us, what each of us feels it to be. To Huysmans the world ...
— Figures of Several Centuries • Arthur Symons
... his information and conclusions on this subject to one of those leaders, the answer given ran thus: "Your intentions are patriotic and your accuracy of observation is probably scientific. But your conclusions are wholly erroneous. You must admit that you are a pessimist. Nor can you deny that we members of the Cabinet dispose of fuller and more decisive data for a judgment than you, with all your opportunities, can muster. After all, we do know something of the temper of the German Government. And we have cogent grounds for holding that neither the Kaiser ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... was a pessimist. And yet he wasn't one of those damnable Pollyanna optimists he so abominated—the kind who went about saying continually that God was in His heaven and all was right with the world. No, indeed! He was just a normal, ...
— The Bad Man • Charles Hanson Towne
... the cultivated court circle, as his letters to his sister and M. Ephrussi, his friend, testify. He was much at home in Germany and there is no denying the influence of Teutonic thought and spirit on his susceptible nature. Naturally prone to pessimism (he has called himself a "mystic pessimist") as was Amiel, the study of Hegel, Schopenhauer, and Hartmann solidified the sentiment. He met an English girl, Leah Lee, by name, and after giving her lessons in French, fell in love, and in 1887 married her. It is interesting ...
— Ivory Apes and Peacocks • James Huneker
... books penetrate, from the White Sea to Australia, from the Pacific to the Indian Ocean, loves the brilliant, manly, downright optimist; the critics and the philosophers care more for the moody and prophetic pessimist. But this does not decide the matter; and it does not follow that either public or critic has the whole truth. If books were written only in the dialect, and with the apocalyptic spirit of Sartor, it ...
— Studies in Early Victorian Literature • Frederic Harrison
... He began murmuring to himself, and a frown settled on his fore head. Mme. Glozel saw that she had perturbed him, and that no doubt she had roused some memories which made sombre the sunny little room where the canary sang; where, to ravish the eyes of the pessimist, was a picture of Louis XVI. going to heaven in the arms ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... bright," he said contemptuously. "The average American is bright. If one prefixes no stronger adjective than that to his name, he accomplishes very little in life. Don't think me a pessimist," he added, smiling. "All over the country the Schools and colleges are instilling the principles of conservatism and practical politics on the old lines, and therein lies hope. I feel sure I shall live to see the Republic safely past the dangers that threaten it now. ...
— Senator North • Gertrude Atherton
... perhaps be condoned on other grounds. By virtue of that process of thought which we call the "association of ideas," I naturally connected Mr. Merrick with this work of super-pessimism; my friends being so confirmed in their belief that he was a super-pessimist. ...
— A Chair on The Boulevard • Leonard Merrick
... will," said Hilary, who was a pessimist. "Peter is no hand at keeping things. We are not ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... a somewhat overwrought condition. Rehearsals had turned him into a pessimist, and, now that the actual moment of production had arrived, his nerves were in a thoroughly jumpy condition, especially as the duologue was to begin in two minutes and the obliging person who had undertaken to ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... vantage, set upon its high hill of ministry to child needs, it flashes like a searchlight through the storm of nineteenth century pedagogical obscurity. The optimist sings a new, glad song; the pessimist is confounded; the searcher after educational truth uncovers reverently before this masterpiece of educational organization, this practical demonstration of the wonders that may be accomplished where head and heart work together through ...
— The New Education - A Review of Progressive Educational Movements of the Day (1915) • Scott Nearing
... handicapped like that? Do you blame me when I say I am going to get out of this town and go away to some place where I'll not have my father's disgrace thrown in my teeth every time I try to do anything worth while? No wonder I'm moody! No wonder I'm a pessimist when I think of the legacy he's saddled us with! Aunt Eunice thought she could always shield us from the knowledge of it, but she could no more do it than ...
— Flip's "Islands of Providence" • Annie Fellows Johnston
... Born at Glenbrook, County Cork, Ireland, April 26, 1880,—three days and three hundred and sixteen years (?) after Mr. William Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon. Education: none or very little, and less German than French. Profession: pessimist. Chief interests: Russian Jewesses and American dollars. In more sober truth, education: Presentation Brothers Schools, Cork School of Art, Cork School of Music, Metropolitan School of Art, Dublin, and Royal College of Art, London. ...
— The Best Short Stories of 1917 - and the Yearbook of the American Short Story • Various
... I've prayed until I'm tired. But don't mind me, dear. I'm what they call a pessimist. I look on the dark side of everything, I suppose; but listen, do you hear what that ...
— For Gold or Soul? - The Story of a Great Department Store • Lurana W. Sheldon
... must create a hotbed of the most dangerous anarchistic and revolutionary epidemics, the spreading of which cannot easily be limited to the spot of their origin. Lastly, even the most irreclaimable pessimist will admit at least the possibility that governments may not be entirely inaccessible to purely humane sentiments of pity and justice, and may regard the treatment of the Jews of Russia and Roumania as an indictment ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... enervation and futilization in that overheated drawingroom atmosphere was delivering the world over to the control of ignorant and soulless cunning and energy, with the frightful consequences which have now overtaken it. Tolstoy was no pessimist: he was not disposed to leave the house standing if he could bring it down about the ears of its pretty and amiable voluptuaries; and he wielded the pickaxe with a will. He treated the case of the inmates as one of opium ...
— Heartbreak House • George Bernard Shaw
... my part," declared Santerre, resuming the pose of an elegant pessimist, "if she wishes to die, I shan't oppose her. In fact, I'm fully ...
— Fruitfulness - Fecondite • Emile Zola
... Pharisees got, and which the early churches sometimes received from Paul, were direct, terrible blows, adapted to a primitive age: Mr. Arnold's hits, full of grace and sting, are adapted to our own age, and are rather worse. When he calls Pius IX. the amiable old pessimist in Saint Peter's chair, or when he calls Dr. Marsh, an Anglican divine who had hung in the railway stations some sets of biblical questions and answers which he does not approve, a "venerable and amiable Coryphaeus of our evangelical party," he uses expressions ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII, No. 28. July, 1873. • Various
... way toward making a body contented. We think it likely that the brown thrush is at some special disadvantage in this respect, or has some peculiar enemies warring upon him; in which case it is no more than we might expect that he should be a pessimist. And, with all our ignorance, we are yet sure that everything has a cause, and we would fain hold by the brave word of Emerson, "Undoubtedly we have no questions to ask which ...
— Birds in the Bush • Bradford Torrey
... struggle for subsistence now keen to a degree which could not have been foretold by the gloomiest pessimist a few years ago; with Parliaments, hitherto safely democratic, threatened with Socialism by the increasing practice of electing artisans and labourers to do the legislative work of their respective classes; the crash of fortunes which never ...
— Australian Writers • Desmond Byrne
... women,—some amiable, and some detestable, but every one of them very interesting. And now I miss the wonder of it all. You will presently discover, my dear, that youth is only an ingenious prologue to whet one's appetite for a rather dull play. Eh, I am no pessimist,—one may still find satisfaction in the exercise of mind and body, in the pleasures of thought and taste and in other titillations of one's faculties. Dinner is good and sleep, too, is excellent. But we men and women ...
— Gallantry - Dizain des Fetes Galantes • James Branch Cabell
... very much alone. It was as if he had buried the friend of half a century. Yet even to bring Janoah back he could not retract the words he had uttered or exchange the light he followed for Janoah's sinister beckonings. In spite of a certain reasonableness in the pessimist's logic; in spite of circumstances he was incapable of explaining; in spite, even, of Cynthia Galbraith, a latent belief in Robert Morton's integrity crystallized into certainty, and he rose to his feet freed of the doubts that had previously ...
— Flood Tide • Sara Ware Bassett
... that nobody ever thoroughly got over a rheumatic fever. Oh, Judith! Judith! it's well for humanity that you're a single person! If haply, there had been any man desperate enough to tackle such a woman in the bonds of marriage, what a pessimist progeny must have ...
— Little Novels • Wilkie Collins
... delightful to be young and full of hopes, and to have the means of realizing them. Above all, it is delicious to know that there is one who will share those ambitions and efforts with you. I see Ricardo is disgusted with me, but he is a pessimist. He does not believe in charity ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... the great pessimist; Hegel, with his doctrine of the supremacy of the State as the representative of the Idea on earth; Kant, as the discoverer of the subjective moral principle; English utilitarianism as the doctrine ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... which had already disengaged itself, to the commonest—the greatest—theme of poetry, but to one which this poet had not yet tried—to Love. Let it be remembered that the thought has the cast of a strictly pessimist quietism—that the style aims, if it aims at any single thing, at the reproduction of the simpler side of classicalism, at an almost prim and quakerish elegance, a sort of childlike grace. There is, however, by no means any great austerity in the tone: on the ...
— Matthew Arnold • George Saintsbury
... the air of all the eighteenth century was full of scientific inquiry and mechanical invention, full of philosophical discussion, full of religious and moral scepticism. If ever there was an age when it looked to the pessimist as if science and philosophy would change the aspect of nature and the heart of man, it was that eighteenth century. Now note that, if some holder of Macaulay's view had risen up in the year 1770 or thereabouts, he might have addressed his contemporaries to great effect ...
— Platform Monologues • T. G. Tucker
... it exasperates you—that's just why I do it." He took the line of earnest inquiry, talked about Balzac and Flaubert, asked me if I thought Dickens DID exaggerate and Thackeray OUGHT to be called a pessimist. Once he came to see me, at his mother's suggestion he declared, on purpose to ask me how far, in my opinion, in the English novel, one really might venture to "go." He was not resigned to the usual pruderies—he suffered under them already. He struck out ...
— Greville Fane • Henry James
... pessimist, sat beside fat Uncle Joseph during their long, long drive, relatives of hers were indeed going into fits; at least, so Florence would have described their gestures and incoherences of comment. Moreover, after the ...
— Gentle Julia • Booth Tarkington
... satirist, because he could not endure to see all his pure ideals and the possibilities of perfection soiled and trampled upon by thoughtless mechanics, aimless mockers and babbling reformers. The humorist may be—and very often is—a sceptic, a pessimist, a nihilist; the satirist is invariably a believer, an optimist, an idealist. For let this dangerous man only come face to face, not with his enemies, but with his ideals, and you will see—as in "Atta Troll"—what a generous friend, what ...
— Atta Troll • Heinrich Heine
... bandaged for several days. But the finest spectacle was to see him in the drawing-room, 'dancing,' as Danjou said, 'before the Ark.' He stretched and bent his unwieldy person in all directions. He would challenge to a philosophic duel the young critic, a confirmed pessimist of three-and-twenty, and overwhelm him with his own imperturbable optimism. Laniboire the philosopher had one particular reason for this good opinion of the world; his wife had died of diphtheria ...
— The Immortal - Or, One Of The "Forty." (L'immortel) - 1877 • Alphonse Daudet
... rectitude. I knew him, and the gentle remembrance of our friendship doubles the pleasure I have in reading his poems. I love Mark Twain—who does not? The gods, too, loved him and put into his heart all manner of wisdom; then, fearing lest he should become a pessimist, they spanned his mind with a rainbow of love and faith. I like Scott for his freshness, dash and large honesty. I love all writers whose minds, like Lowell's, bubble up in the sunshine of optimism—fountains of joy and good will, with occasionally a splash of anger and here and there a ...
— Story of My Life • Helen Keller
... clean of bargain-counter words. A while ago the journalists had a furious run upon the adjective 'un-American.' Anybody or anything that displeased them was 'un-American.' They ran it into the ground, and in its place they have lately set up 'pessimist,' which certainly has a threatening appearance. They don't know its meaning, and in their mouths it merely signifies that what a man says snakes them feel personally uncomfortable. The word has become a dusty rag of slang. The arrested burglar very likely calls the policeman a ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... contemptuous of the reasoning faculty, which he typified in the shifty, unreal, delusive Loki, and full of faith in the life-giving Will, which he typified in the glorious Siegfried. Not until he read Schopenhaur did he become bent on proving that he had always been a Pessimist at heart, and that Loki was the most sensible and worthy adviser of Wotan in ...
— The Perfect Wagnerite - A Commentary on the Niblung's Ring • George Bernard Shaw
... be a pessimist to assert the actual evidence thus far obtained indicates that the supposed progress made in the improvement of domesticated animals and plants is nothing more than the sorting out of pure lines, and thus represents no advancement."—Prof. L.B. ...
— Q. E. D., or New Light on the Doctrine of Creation • George McCready Price
... beginning; and it goes every time in a different direction. All the rational philosophers have gone along different roads, so it is impossible to say which has gone farthest. Who can discuss whether Emerson was a better optimist than Schopenhauer was pessimist? It is like asking if this corn is as yellow as that hill is steep. No; there are only two things that really progress; and they both accept accumulations of authority. They may be progressing uphill ...
— The Ball and The Cross • G.K. Chesterton
... the famous University Commission, and contributed ideas to the subject of academic reform on more sides than one. But such matters he found desultory and unsatisfying; he was in a state of famine; his mind was suffering, not growing; he was becoming brooding, melancholy, taciturn, and finally pessimist (pp. 306, 307). Pattison was five-and-forty before he reached the conception of what became his final ideal, as it had been in a slightly different shape his first and earliest. He had always been ...
— Critical Miscellanies (Vol. 3 of 3) - Essay 5: On Pattison's Memoirs • John Morley
... the healthiest of all lives. It is only in theory that solitude is morbid. If you knew more of the world, Miss Thurwell, you would understand something of its cramping influence upon all independent thought. I am not a pessimist—at least, I try not to be. I do not wish to say that there is more badness than goodness in the world, but there is certainly more littleness than greatness. To live in any manner of society without imbibing a certain form of selfishness ...
— The New Tenant • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "That is where we are going, if there is any possible way to go. An optimist would stand here and wait, certain that wings would soon sprout for him to fly up; a pessimist would sit down and quit. An optimist is a fool; a pessimist ...
— Out of the Depths - A Romance of Reclamation • Robert Ames Bennet
... supreme crises of the world come, and he has for the time to step aside; to be a mere onlooker; to wait in awe-struck patience until the pessimist beholds the realization of his worst fears; until the optimist can take heart again, and reviving his crushed and withered hopes once more set their fulfillment forward ...
— The Trade Union Woman • Alice Henry
... suffering, failure are as needful as ballast to a ship, without which it does not draw enough water, becomes a plaything for the winds and waves, travels no certain road, and easily overturns.' If the gloomiest pessimist of this century can extract that comfort, what may I not hope for my future? I am going to rebuild my house at X——and when it is completed, I shall expect the privilege of returning the hospitality you have so kindly shown me. I shall be very busy ...
— At the Mercy of Tiberius • August Evans Wilson
... what kind they are," the pessimist replied intolerantly. "I'm asking you to face facts. Because you've succeeded in an attack, you soldiers seem to think that the war is ended. You base your arguments all the time on your little local knowledge ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... of affairs, statesman, thinker, and pessimist, found in his new friendship with Diana at once that "agreement," that relaxation, which men of his sort can only find in the society of those women who, without competing with them, can yet by sympathy and native ...
— The Testing of Diana Mallory • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... place than has hitherto been attached to it. Her father moved to a melancholy house in Wimpole Street; and his own character growing gloomier and stranger as time went on, he mounted guard over his daughter's sickbed in a manner compounded of the pessimist and the disciplinarian. She was not permitted to stir from the sofa, often not even to cross two rooms to her bed. Her father came and prayed over her with a kind of melancholy glee, and with the avowed solemnity of a watcher by a deathbed. She was ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... could never comprehend was the pessimism that so often cropped up. The wild Irish playwright had terrible spells of depression. Shelley, who wrote vaudeville turns in the concrete cell, was a chronic pessimist. St. John, a young magazine writer, was an anarchic disciple of Nietzsche. Masson, a painter, held to a doctrine of eternal recurrence that was petrifying. And Hall, usually so merry, could outfoot them all ...
— The Valley of the Moon • Jack London
... I had had the money, but, as I have already told you, all that I can do barely suffices to procure me 'de quoi vivre'. 'Je me sens ecceuye'. Do not pay too much attention to my Jeremiads; you know what a pessimist I am. ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... in manner, with shining eyes—almost toad-like—a yellowish-white complexion, and coal-black hair. His vivacity was un-English, yet at the back of his nature there lay surely a stagnant reservoir of melancholy. He was a pessimist, full of ardour. He revelled, intellectually, in the sorrows and in the evils that afflict ...
— Tongues of Conscience • Robert Smythe Hichens
... description of the lady was correct, and, this being so, she supposed that the facts and traits of character which he told her about in other people were also true. She thus adopted the Smithsonian, or fashionable-pessimist view of society in general, and resigned herself to the idea that the world was a very wicked world, as well as a very pleasant world, that the wickedest people were generally the pleasantest, and that it ...
— Phantom Fortune, A Novel • M. E. Braddon
... the pessimist cry, but unfortunately for Friend Pessimist, we have a gauge on the over-production idea that lays all fears to rest. When the supply of any commodity increases faster than the demand, we have over-production and falling prices. Vice-versa, ...
— The Dollar Hen • Milo M. Hastings
... a hopeless pessimist as to French affairs. They certainly are not going on smoothly, but where is the new Boulanger? Bourbons and Bonapartes are played out; and France might advertise for a dictator without finding one. If that be so, what threatens the republic? A socialist ...
— Memoirs of the Life and Correspondence of Henry Reeve, C.B., D.C.L. - In Two Volumes. VOL. II. • John Knox Laughton
... Sanders, who had been in the chorus of different comic-opera companies since he was twenty years old, and who was something of a pessimist, used to take great pleasure in abusing the other members of the company to Andy M'Gee, and in telling anecdotes concerning them which were extremely detrimental to their characters. He could not find anything good to say ...
— Van Bibber and Others • Richard Harding Davis
... an Astrologer The Tendril's Fate The Times The Question Sorrow's Uses If Which are you? The Creed to be Inspiration The Wish Three Friends You never can tell Here and now Unconquered All that love asks "Does it pay?" Sestina The Optimist The Pessimist An Inspiration Life's Harmonies Preparation Gethsemane God's Measure Noblesse Oblige Through Tears What we Need Plea to Science Respite Song My Ships Her Love If Love's burial "Love is enough" Life is a Privilege Insight A Woman's ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... of their reception of him, that indexed their true feelings. Teddy Jinks refused to serve out the supper hash until Tresler had all he required. Lew Cawley washed out a plate for him, as a special favor; and Raw Harris, pessimist as he was, and who had a way of displaying the fact in all the little every-day matters of life, cleaned and sharpened a knife for him by prodding it up to the hilt in the hard-beaten earth, and cleaned the prongs of a fork with the edge of his buckskin shirt. But he could not ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... heaviest patron was the keeper of a variety store, and the first specimen of a pessimist I ever encountered. He was an excellent specimen. He took exception to everything. He objected to the telegraph, to the railway, to steam in all its applications. Some of his arguments, I recollect, made a deep impression on my mind. "Nowadays," he once observed to me, "if your son ...
— An Old Town By The Sea • Thomas Bailey Aldrich
... on another page,[22] "would be capable of killing another merely to get some fat to smear on his boots." The grim old pessimist confesses that at first he advanced this opinion as a hyperbole; but on second thought he doubts if it is an exaggeration after all. Had he been more familiar with the habits of savages, he would have been fully justified ...
— Primitive Love and Love-Stories • Henry Theophilus Finck
... Pavaniev strove in no way to make them appear better.—It was a peculiar form of flattery, but one heretofore used with excellent effect.—Ivan, however, failed to appreciate it; and presently pushed past the pessimist, flung open the bedroom door, and—paused. A sound had reached his ears that struck him to the heart: a high, feeble, gasping wail, that was repeated again and again. Ivan shuddered, and immediately the smooth voice ...
— The Genius • Margaret Horton Potter
... one's door, The streets are choked with messy mist; I'm the proverbial Bachelor, An old, prosaic Pessimist. Yet somehow—who can tell me why?— Urged by the Past's dim Phantom, I'm Disposed my cosy Club to fly, And ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Vol. 100., Jan. 17, 1891 • Various
... it is like our Mr. GALSWORTHY to assume that things will be as black as ever a few years hence. 'Tis, no doubt, what encourages us to keep our end up in the great War. But we know the customs of leopards, and can forgive our pessimist for his creations (for all the world as if he were a milliner) of Poulder, Lord William's butler, rounded pillar of the eternal old order of things; of James, revolutionary but faithful (of course James never would in fact ...
— Punch, 1917.07.04, Vol. 153, Issue No. 1 • Various
... think that he was a pessimist. And yet, after only three years of their trip, after only fifty Earthlike but lifeless worlds, he had been the first to consider the possibility that life was unique to Earth and that their old theories concerning its spontaneous emergence from a ...
— An Empty Bottle • Mari Wolf
... after leaving her I remembered how certain types of people always look for the dark side of things. It costs no more to be an optimist than a pessimist; it is sunshine grows flowers, not clouds; and if Miss Francis chose to think the grass might live a thousand years, I was equally free to think it might die next week. Thus heartened by this bit of homely philosophy, ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... to come upon the cities of the Plain. But she felt one couldn't walk out of things as Lot had walked. Only—she had to do her worrying with placid face, giving lip-service to his entertainment; it would never do for him to know the convolutions that had led her to any conclusion; he was an innate pessimist, she an optimist. So she thought with half her mind and ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... suddenly seized with such severe internal pains, accompanied by faintness and nausea, that on arrival at the Slaviansky Bazar (the best Hotel, by the way, in the place), I was carried to bed. The attack was inexplicable. Harding, ever a pessimist, suggested appendicitis, and a physician was hastily summoned. The medicine-man gravely shook his head: "You are very ill," he said, and I did not dispute the fact. "Can it be appendicitis?" I asked anxiously. ...
— From Paris to New York by Land • Harry de Windt
... to the beginning of things yet," he interrupted, following up the line of thought the Maluka had at first suggested. "Before any trees are cut down, we'll have to dig a saw-pit and find a pit-sawyer." Dan was not a pessimist; he only liked to dig down to the very root of things, besides objecting to sugar-coated pills as being a ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... a pessimist, nor misanthrope, nor grumbler; I bear it all, the burden of Public Affairs, the immensity of Space, the brevity of Life, and the thought of the all-swallowing Grave—all this I put up with without impatience. I accept the common lot. And if now and then for a moment it seems ...
— More Trivia • Logan Pearsall Smith
... A pessimist is one who never expects to find anything to suit him. Geordie hain't got ...
— Anne's House of Dreams • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... luck as that," Williams said, with the air of a confirmed pessimist. "I hope you locked that there bedroom door and put the key in your pocket, miss. I suppose we'd better send for the doctor, unless you and me puts him out of his misery. There's one comfort, however, Mr. Henson will be in bed for the next fortnight, ...
— The Crimson Blind • Fred M. White
... the ineffable insight of the artist, and no poetry is satisfying which does not spring from this source. Wagner in the letter I quoted before, speaks of the cheerful playfulness of Spanish poets after they had adopted the ascetic life. The philosophic pessimist is not a fretful and malignant caviller who sneers at the follies of others because he thinks himself so much wiser than they. Any one may note among the ascetics of his acquaintance, those who take no pleasure in what delights others and live a life of self-denial and abstemiousness, ...
— Wagner's Tristan und Isolde • George Ainslie Hight
... right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... slow to trust my judgment on my own. I have always found that, whenever I thought a heap of anything I owned, there was nothing like getting the other fellow's views expressed in figures; and the other fellow is usually a pessimist when he's buying. The lady on the dollar is the only woman who hasn't any sentiment in her make-up. And if you really want a look at the solid facts of a thing you must strain off ...
— Letters from a Self-Made Merchant to His Son • George Horace Lorimer
... fail ever to lift their weary eyes to the proper object of their trust. Like the Israelites of old, they succeed at length in escaping from the hands of oppression and tyranny, but only to wander in a desert land throughout the length of their days. This is the region where dwell the pessimist, the skeptic and the cynic—miserable mortals that have wasted on creatures the talents they should have given to their Creator, or that have otherwise failed in their conception of life, and have left unmultiplied the money of the Master.(92) ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... of a baby is so commonplace, so unimportant. Few reasoning people, viewing the matter in the abstract, can do otherwise than rejoice that a human being is saved from the weariness of the tired years that make up life. For who shall disprove the pessimist's assertion that it is better not to have been born than to come into the world, and that it is better to die than to live? But those from whom the single hope of their existence is ravished find little consolation ...
— The Morals of Marcus Ordeyne • William J. Locke
... would be the man to put everything right. In historical practice the thing is quite the other way; curiously enough, it is the man who likes things as they are who really makes them better. The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than the pessimist Gissing. A man like Rousseau has far too rosy a theory of human nature; but he produces a revolution. A man like David Hume thinks that almost all things are depressing; but he is a Conservative, and wishes ...
— All Things Considered • G. K. Chesterton
... the oldest, and the best family that favored this wretched, hopeless world with residence. He hinted darkly at a villainous conspiracy that had deprived him of his estates and lairdships in dear old Stornoway, Bonnie Scotland. He was a pessimist of parts, and he furnished the needed shade that made brighter Martin's ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... is one of the most attractive and enterprising of the new Members. But I am afraid, despite his cheery appearance, that he is a bit of a pessimist. With Peace believed to be so near, it was distinctly depressing to find him calling attention to the danger of a deficiency of pit-props "in any future war," and refusing to be put off with the usual official answer, "in view of the urgency ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, May 14, 1919 • Various
... or a swallow, so did I chatter!" said the rueful prophet. I do not write as a pessimist, hardly as a critic; still less as a censor; to waste time in deriding others' theories of life is a very poor substitute for enjoying it! I think we do very fairly well as we are; only do not let us ...
— Joyous Gard • Arthur Christopher Benson
... The pessimist is convinced that the world is a bad place, the optimist is sure that it can be good. That is the point of the book. Chesterton has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... profession, but so far as my experience goes, the "hobo" is an idealist. Of the many reasons he has taken to the road, not the least is the freedom from the shackles of convention and the "Gradgrind" methods of an utilitarian and materialistic age. Nor is he a pessimist. Whatever his trouble, the road has eased him of his burden and made him ...
— A Tramp Through the Bret Harte Country • Thomas Dykes Beasley
... pessimist was Louis McGregor Abraham, proprietor of the Imperial Hotel—Syrian by birth, Jew by creed, Englishman by nationality, and admirer first, last and all the time of all things prosperous and promising, except his ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... pleasantness for the sake of Peggy, a half-breed girl, for whom he had been prepared already to sacrifice his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist is capable of turning ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... a pessimist with all your inferences. I only wish I knew where Frau von Wallmoden was, but I don't ...
— The Northern Light • E. Werner
... it was difficult for this philosophy of ours to formulate itself in the second half of the nineteenth century, a period that was aphilosophical, positivist, technicist, devoted to pure history and the natural sciences, a period essentially materialist and pessimist. ...
— Tragic Sense Of Life • Miguel de Unamuno
... himself; what's the difference between an optimist and a pessimist? One honeymoon. And now they had reached their home town. People were not altogether new to Warble. She had seen them before. But these were her own people, to bathe and encourage and adorn—and, they ...
— Ptomaine Street • Carolyn Wells
... more carvings. The flames produce nothing but a little black heap. When any act has this cul-de-sac quality it matters little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the energy, but in the effect. When the optimist has said, "All ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... pessimist, they were not! She had diagnosed me as a six and a half, and six and a half I am, so all was peace and joy. I put on a new pair the next day when I went out for a constitutional. It was quite a tonic. Gloves ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... hats. One man is six or eight feet high, with open-plumbed joints and a heartbroken cast of countenance. He picks up the watch that has stuck in the mud. The other man, who is little, with pink hair and white eyes, goes for the empty case, and says, 'I win.' Then the elevated pessimist goes down under his leather leg-holsters and hands a handful of twenty- dollar gold pieces to his albino friend. I don't know how much money it was; it looked as big as ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... and brilliant man in New York who is full of charm and wit in conversation, but the moment he touches a pen he becomes, as a rule, a melancholy pessimist, crying out at the injustice of the world and the uselessness of high endeavor ...
— Freedom, Truth and Beauty • Edward Doyle |
