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More "Optimistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... curious to see this antagonistic pair together; but it was the middle of the afternoon before Raffles reappeared, though Mr. Garland told me he had received an optimistic note from him by special messenger earlier in the day. I felt I might have been told a little more, considering the intimate part I was already playing as a stranger in a strange house. But I was only too thankful to ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... guidance in times of difficulty, wise counsel for moments of perplexity, a stimulant to faithfulness, a cure for the blues, exhilaration, jubilation. Everything of a depressing nature has been scrupulously ruled out. The keynote, persistently followed through all the pages, is optimistic, bright, buoyant. Trumpet calls and bugle notes are furnished in abundance, but no dirges or elegies. Large space, it will be seen, is given to such topics as Heroism, True Greatness, the Care and Presence of God, the blessings of Brotherliness, the privilege of Service, the path of Peace, ...
— Poems with Power to Strengthen the Soul • Various
... awakened from a sort of stupor. Life, so gray yesterday, now appeared full of color and possibilities. Most men who either from choice or necessity have knocked about the world for any length of time are more or less fatalists. Jimmy was an optimistic fatalist. He had always looked on Fate, not as a blind dispenser at random of gifts good and bad, but rather as a benevolent being with a pleasing bias in his own favor. He had almost a Napoleonic faith ...
— The Intrusion of Jimmy • P. G. Wodehouse
... Alien.—After all is said, the immigrant problem is not insoluble. There is much in the situation to make one optimistic. Thus far the native stock has been able to survive and to give its best to the newcomer. The immigrant himself has no desire to destroy American institutions. He comes longing to share in their benefits. America is to him an Eldorado, a promised land flowing with milk and ...
— Society - Its Origin and Development • Henry Kalloch Rowe
... possession of Mrs. A.S. Erwin, Athens, Ga., printed in Plantation and Frontier, II, 41. The writer must have been well advanced in years or else highly optimistic. Otherwise he could not have expected to earn his purchase price within ...
— American Negro Slavery - A Survey of the Supply, Employment and Control of Negro Labor as Determined by the Plantation Regime • Ulrich Bonnell Phillips
... you must recall I have spent my adult life going, as it were, in one direction and it is now not a matter of merely retracing my steps, but of starting out for an entirely different destination in a field where there are no highwaymaps and few compasspoints. I cannot say I am even optimistic of success, but it is not for want of ...
— Greener Than You Think • Ward Moore
... shortly after they were married, because this was the proper thing to do. And Coth was civil enough, for Coth, and voiced a hope that Florimel might have a good influence upon Jurgen and make him worth his salt, but did not pretend to be optimistic. Yet this visit was never returned, because Coth considered his wickedness was too great for him to be spared a moment of torment, and so ...
— Jurgen - A Comedy of Justice • James Branch Cabell
... remarks were made with a good-nature decidedly optimistic, as could be seen, when the fiacre finally drew up at the given address. It was that of a very modest restaurant decorated with this signboard: 'Trattoria al Marzocco.' And the 'Marzocco', the lion symbolical of Florence, ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Macalister wrote to say that he had had to pay two and a quarter for the shares. He said that the market was firm. But in a day or two there was a set-back. The news that came from South Africa was less reassuring, and Philip with anxiety saw that his shares had fallen to two; but Macalister was optimistic, the Boers couldn't hold out much longer, and he was willing to bet a top-hat that Roberts would march into Johannesburg before the middle of April. At the account Philip had to pay out nearly forty pounds. It worried him considerably, but he felt that the only course was to hold ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... The preceding comments were made by engineers thinking primarily of the commercial possibilities of the diesel. Following are comments by flight crewmembers about the operating characteristics of the Packard diesel. The former were largely optimistic. Most of them were only familiar with the aeronautical diesel as a design project and therefore did not have the practical experience necessary to understand all of its limitations. The latter were pessimistic, as they knew firsthand various shortcomings of the engine which only became apparent ...
— The First Airplane Diesel Engine: Packard Model DR-980 of 1928 • Robert B. Meyer
... securing one's substance. Hence the woman through whom Adam eats of the tree of knowledge and becomes conscious of being naked is looked upon as an evil tempter, entailing the loss of the primeval life of bliss in a gorgeous Paradise. The Babylonian point of view is optimistic. The change to civilized life—involving the wearing of clothes and the eating of food that is cultivated (bread and wine) is looked upon as an advance. Hence the woman is viewed as the medium of raising man to a higher level. The feature common to the Biblical and Babylonian tales ...
— An Old Babylonian Version of the Gilgamesh Epic • Anonymous
... TURN OF FORTUNE.—The Doctor falls from the pinnacle of his optimistic confidence, and learns that he will have the Compact Majority, not at, but ...
— Play-Making - A Manual of Craftsmanship • William Archer
... this optimistic prophecy was a noncommittal grunt, accompanied by a slight outthrust and uplift of the chin, a pursing of the lips and the ghost of a sardonic little smile. Only an Irishman can get the right tempo to that grunt—and the ...
— Cappy Ricks Retires • Peter B. Kyne
... is misleading. Moira meant a fixed order in the universe; but as a fact to which men must bow, it had enough in common with fatality to demand a philosophy of resignation and to hinder the creation of an optimistic atmosphere of hope. It was this order which kept things in their places, assigned to each its proper sphere and function, and drew a definite line, for instance, between men and gods. Human progress towards perfection—towards an ideal of omniscience, or an ideal of happiness, ...
— The Idea of Progress - An Inquiry Into Its Origin And Growth • J. B. Bury
... water by the window in a milk-pail. He poured some in a basin, washed his face and hands and found the water cold enough to hurt his face. Still his excitement kept him keyed to a pitch of singular and optimistic hilarity. Through the kitchen window came the pale glimmer of snow. He hoped Hughie wouldn't hear him harnessing Nellie, and shoot at the barn. The possibility sent him to the kitchen stairway. It wound upward in an old-fashioned twist to the ...
— Kenny • Leona Dalrymple
... nobly to his editorial appeals to come out and help found an Empire. The majority of the optimistic citizens who walked with their heads in the clouds and their eyes on the roseate future were there through his efforts. Appreciative of this fact, the Major's eyes were kindly as they gazed upon the editor's ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... You may not be optimistic; perhaps you lack self-confidence, or maybe you are wanting in courage. But with the possible exception of these three "heart" qualities of the master salesman, you are not deficient now in the emotional essentials of successful salesmanship. ...
— Certain Success • Norval A. Hawkins
... juvenile mind, therefore, that neither she nor her descendants would ever recover from such a blow. But, under all the circumstances, would she be allowed to join in the procession? Even Rebecca, the optimistic, feared not, and the committee confirmed her fears by saying that Abner Simpson's daughter certainly could not take any prominent part in the ceremony, but that they hoped Mrs. Fogg would allow ...
— The Flag-raising • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... them will die in time and acquire peace. And then they'll know the truth, for it never comes except in the society of worms. Have I got the essence of your optimistic philosophy down right, ...
— Savva and The Life of Man • Leonid Andreyev
... by another person walking in the sunshine—a slight-built man in a turned-down collar, with a thin and fair moustache, and a faint bluish tint on one side of his high forehead, caused by a network of thin veins. His face had something of the youthful, optimistic, stained-glass look peculiar to the refined English type. He walked elastically, yet with trim precision, as if he had a pleasant taste in furniture and churches, and held the ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... and Mrs. Percival and not for herself. Madeline set Lena's teeth on edge, and it must be confessed that Lena often did as much for Madeline, but each politely kept her sensations to herself. Miss Elton always assured her optimistic soul that things would come out all right, that love was a great developer, that small vulgarities of mind were the result ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... that he ever found these insufficient, or that he ever essentially departed from them. Of his genuine religious feeling his writings, give ample testimony. His nature was at heart devout; his ideas of life, of death, and of what lies beyond, were essentially cheerful, hopeful, optimistic. He did not care to talk much on theological points; but he believed in the supremacy of good in the ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... day as they drove along they talked of the improvement on the farm and the profit they ought to be able to earn with the new equipment. Bob was the optimist and his uncle the pessimist in these discussions, but optimistic Bob was not without his pencil and memorandum book and usually had the better of the argument because of his uncle's disinclination to take the time to figure out the advantages ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... religious frame of mind.... Idleness and luxury are not among the distinguishing characteristics of the descendants of the Puritans.... In the light, transparent atmosphere of the States, simplicity, the cheerful, alert spirit infects the foreigner, makes him a more frank, trustful, optimistic warrior for the truth, and causes him to forget what it means to be downcast in spirit, or ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 2, May, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... But the next year opened less prosperously. Bridget was compelled to give up her work in the factory, and when, in the middle of a particularly rigorous winter, a baby was born to the house of Davitt, the outlook would have appeared discouraging to any one less optimistic than Bridget. But she found much cause for satisfaction in the thought that the baby had come at this particular time, when Michael could be at home to help take care of the house; and above all in the reflection that the baby was a boy, "who'd not be thrubblin' ...
— Flint - His Faults, His Friendships and His Fortunes • Maud Wilder Goodwin
... the end of the week. The men, also, will camel. There is, indeed, no alternative between camelling and sandcarting—sandcarting not recommended by the faculty but insisted upon by Cleopatra. Hope it will work out all right; and am inclined to be optimistic. A week in the desert and the flowery oasis of the Fayum, with the two most charming women in Egypt! There will be others, but there's a man each, and more. I shall have to look after Monny and Brigit, as Anthony is having his hands full with Cleopatra lately, and, besides, he can't start with ...
— It Happened in Egypt • C. N. Williamson & A. M. Williamson
... in 1789, he foresaw nothing like that; he was optimistic, pacific, liberal, humanitarian; he knew nothing of Europe nor of history, nothing of the past nor of the present. When the Constituent Assembly constituted him a sovereign, he let things go on; he did not know what he engaged to do, he had no idea of having allowed such a heavy claim against ...
— The Origins of Contemporary France, Volume 5 (of 6) - The Modern Regime, Volume 1 (of 2)(Napoleon I.) • Hippolyte A. Taine
... was not so but I have given the thought exactly, a thought, as you see, full of affection and with a very faint perfume of poetry about it. You will not accuse me, therefore, of being too optimistic when I affirm that the Sakai, in spite of his semblance to a wild man of the bush, savage, suspicious and superstitious as he is, is susceptible of rapid intellectual progress whenever the right means are used in his favour, ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... fulfil the country practitioner's optimistic prophecy. The change in her condition, as day after day crept by, growing longer and colder, was almost imperceptible; but it was steadily for the worse. The mountain winter closed in with unusual rigors, and Smiles' cabin continued to be a hospital where she ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... the whole he considered it perhaps as well they were not married. There was no telling what might happen to him and she would be in a better position if he succumbed to the chances of war. Not that he had any fears on that score; he looked forward to the coming struggle in a very optimistic mood. ...
— The Rider in Khaki - A Novel • Nat Gould
... very nature of her new and optimistic creed, was powerless to stand out against him. Earlier, fathoming his purposes, she would have raged, have burst into a passion. Now she could only minister to him with an impassive calm, while, in her secret heart, she was piously commending him to the attention ...
— The Brentons • Anna Chapin Ray
... with the very first cup of tea, and we went for our usual evening stroll through the paddocks, with all our old appreciation; and on our return found the men stretched out on the grass beyond the Quarters, optimistic and happy, sipping at further cups of tea. (Sam's kettle ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... that the name of James Bansemer was not mentioned. The reports from the bedside of the robber's victim were most optimistic. She was delirious from the effects of the shock, but no serious results were expected. The great headlines on the first page of the paper he was reading set his mind temporarily at rest. There was no suggestion of truth ...
— Jane Cable • George Barr McCutcheon
... revival, which history shows us continually as existing on the broad level of the soil, must have brought them back to rough ease and comfort, and the freedom of the natural healthful atmosphere which makes itself apparent in transcripts of life so little likely to be forced or optimistic. In all times and circumstances there can be little doubt that the amount of simple enjoyment to be got out of life, especially by the young, who form at least the half of every community, far exceeds the elements of wellbeing which outsiders see in it. And ...
— Royal Edinburgh - Her Saints, Kings, Prophets and Poets • Margaret Oliphant
... German, but of late several have been translated into the English language, and now the students of philosophy and religion are agog with accounts of a new philosopher who is at once a great ethical teacher and an optimistic prophet. There is no doubt that Eucken has a great message, and those who cannot find time to make a thorough study of his works should not fail to know something of the man and his teachings. The aim of this volume is to give a brief and clear account ...
— Rudolph Eucken • Abel J. Jones
... case of an optimistic creed based on an intuition of the essential kinship of all things, it is profitable to study the poetry of a Sufi mystic of the thirteenth century. How delicate the thought enshrined ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success—that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; but, to get her whole mind as one gives it only ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Peninsula had, after suffering very heavy losses, straightway been brought to a standstill. As regards the Fleet's efforts against the Straits, I gathered at the time (from Fitzgerald, I think) that in taking an optimistic view of the project when it was under discussion by the War Council, Lord K. had been a good deal influenced by recollections of the bombardment of Alexandria, at which he had been present. The Chief always claimed to have been led astray ...
— Experiences of a Dug-out, 1914-1918 • Charles Edward Callwell
... ever suspected. The stage had lost an artist of no mean ability when Ezra Melville had taken to the cattle business. Outwardly, to the last, little lines about his lips and eyes, he was his genial, optimistic, droll old self. His eye twinkled, his face beamed in the gray stubble, his voice was rollicking with the fun of life the same as ever. And like Pagliacci in his masque there was not the slightest exterior sign of the fear and despair ...
— The Sky Line of Spruce • Edison Marshall
... Ophir. Jim was busy making ready for his hydraulic work of the coming Spring, and once in a while we took a run up to see him. I was much worried about the old man. He was no longer the cheerful, optimistic Jim of the trail. He had taken to living alone. He had become grim and taciturn. He cared only for his work, and, while he read his Bible more than ever, it was with a growing fondness for the stern old prophets. There was no doubt the North ...
— The Trail of '98 - A Northland Romance • Robert W. Service
... since Adam Smith, have pointed out the ADVANTAGES and the INCONVENIENCES of the law of division, but at the same time insisting much more strenuously upon the first than the second, because such a course was more in harmony with their optimistic views, and not one of them ever asking how a LAW can have INCONVENIENCES. This is the way in which J. B. Say ...
— The Philosophy of Misery • Joseph-Pierre Proudhon
... deliberate footfalls; and the sound filled her with a formless resentment. She wished to be justifiably annoyed by them, or him; but there was absolutely no cause. Cesare Orsi's character and disposition were alike beyond reproach—transparent and heroically optimistic. Since their marriage she had been insolent, she had been both captious and continuously indifferent, without unsettling the determined eager good-nature with which he ...
— The Happy End • Joseph Hergesheimer
... me thoroughly settled in my new quarters, and myself in quite an optimistic frame of mind as I drew close to the most fearfully and wonderfully mutilated little cook-stove that ever cheered the heart of a lonely Fourteenth-street "light housekeeper." In the red-hot glow of its presence, ...
— The Long Day - The Story of a New York Working Girl As Told by Herself • Dorothy Richardson
... himself looked upon it as being too near akin to gambling; but feeling well disposed towards Tom, and the sum required being very moderate, he lent his friend the money, quite prepared, knowing Tom's optimistic, harum-scarum character, ...
— The Boys of Crawford's Basin - The Story of a Mountain Ranch in the Early Days of Colorado • Sidford F. Hamp
... insisted that Alice's illness was but temporary, and was tireless in his energetic pursuit of treatment for his wife. Everything must be hoped, and everything must be tried, and Alice's mother knew that one of the real crosses of her daughter's life was sorrowful pity for Chris's optimistic delusions. ...
— The Beloved Woman • Kathleen Norris
... newspapers on President Wilson's note of June 9 was reported by THE TIMES staff correspondent in Berlin on June 12 as being "surprisingly restrained and optimistic." Captain L. Persius, the naval critic of the Berliner Tageblatt, which is close to Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, writing under the caption, "On the Way ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... Professor James's view of truth determines his view of the world. It is pluralistic, not monistic; melioristic, not optimistic. It is characteristic of him that when he discusses the question, Is life worth living? his answer practically is, 'Yes, if you believe it is.' Pragmatism is put forward as the mediator between two opposite tendencies, those of 'tender-mindedness' ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... disputed, great forces were at work among the Russian people. By 1910 the terrible pall of depression and despair which had settled upon the nation as a result of the failure of the First Revolution began to break. There was a new generation of college students, youthful and optimistic spirits who were undeterred by the failure of 1905-06, confident that they were wiser and certain to succeed. Also there had been an enormous growth of working-class organizations, large numbers of unions and co-operative societies having ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... which bring genius to all but ruin, a study of the erroneous conduct of life by men of extraordinary powers. In each poem the chief personage aspires and fails, yet rises—for Browning was not of the temper to accept ultimate failures, and postulated a heaven to warrant his optimistic creed—rises at the close from failure to a spiritual recovery, which may be regarded as attainment, but an attainment, as far as earth and its uses are concerned, marred and piteous; he recovers in the end his true direction, but recovers it only for service ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... began to seek better hunting-grounds elsewhere. British Columbia, Alberta and Alaska have done much for the game of Montana by drawing sportsmen away from it. Mr. Henry Avare, the State Game Warden, is optimistic regarding even the big game, and believes that it is holding its own. This is partially true of white-tailed deer, or it was up to the time of great slaughter. It is said that in 1911, 11,000 deer were killed in Montana, all in the western part of the state, ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... time to Irving, though treating Columbus with less fulness of detail, came the polished historian Prescott, whose "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" was published in 1837. This ardent and laborious scholar was, like Irving, constitutionally inclined to the optimistic view of his leading characters. To magnify the virtues and to minimize the faults of their heroes has always been the besetting sin of biographers. The pomp and picturesque circumstance of the Spanish court, the splendid administrative abilities of Ferdinand, the beauty, amiability, and devoted ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... "V-I" was brought before the notice of the German military department the pressing point concerning its military recommendations arose at once. The inventor had foreseen this issue and was optimistic. Thereupon the authorities asked if the inventor were prepared to justify his claims. The retort was positive. Forthwith the Junkers decided to submit it ...
— Aeroplanes and Dirigibles of War • Frederick A. Talbot
... goodness of civilised humanity, it is still beyond all doubt that Christianity has broken down, and that this breakdown has been brought home to everyone by the terrible catastrophe which has befallen the world. Can the most optimistic apologist contend that this is a satisfactory, outcome from a religion which has had the unopposed run of Europe for so many centuries? Which has come out of it worst, the Lutheran Prussian, the Catholic Bavarian, or the peoples who have been nurtured by the Greek Church? If ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... you're born!" said Wyngate, with optimistic decision. "That's always the way. You'll find every crack of that blessed old shed stuck full of greenbacks and certificates of deposit, and lots of gold dust and coin buried all over that cow patch! And of course no one suspected ...
— Openings in the Old Trail • Bret Harte
... in 2001. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies. Sao Tome is optimistic that substantial petroleum discoveries are forthcoming in its territorial waters in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea; production could ...
— The 2003 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency
... ashen, like the face Of some poor wretch who drains life's cup too fast Yet, swaying to and fro, as if to fling About chilled Nature its lithe arms of grace, Smiling with promise in the wintry blast, The optimistic Willow ...
— Poems of Power • Ella Wheeler Wilcox
... asked. "Are you not a trifle optimistic? Don't you think that it will take months before the possibilities and meaning of the germ ...
— The Blue Germ • Martin Swayne
... whistling. I wish he had been less optimistic. When we came back and told him the whole story, and he sat with his mouth open and his hair, as he said, crackling at the roots, I reminded him with some bitterness that he had encouraged us. His only retort was to say that the excursion itself had been harmless enough; but ...
— Tish, The Chronicle of Her Escapades and Excursions • Mary Roberts Rinehart
... agitated condition would not be noticed. He felt quite faint at the shock of seeing his name on the list of the first fifteen. There it was, however, as large as life. "M. Barry." Separated from the rest by a thin red line, but still there. In his most optimistic moments he had never dreamed of this. M'Todd was reading slowly through the list of the second. He did everything slowly, ...
— The Gold Bat • P. G. Wodehouse
... whatever they might be. Fate had played a strange game with Barry Houston. It had taken a care-free, happy-go-lucky youth and turned him into a suspicious, distrustful person with a constantly morbid strain which struggled everlastingly for supremacy over his usually cheery grin and his naturally optimistic outlook upon life. For Fate had allowed Houston to live the youth of his life in ease and brightness and lack of worry, only that it might descend upon him with the greatest cloud that man can know. And two ...
— The White Desert • Courtney Ryley Cooper
... slipping down in the embrace of his friend. It was too horrible to be true. It must have been a trick just to scare the boys. The world was full of joshers—Jack knew half a dozen men capable of playing that trick, just to turn the joke. For a few minutes he was optimistic, almost making himself believe that the man had not been shot, after all. The fading effect of the wines he had drunk sent his mood swinging from the depths of panicky anguish over the horrible affair, to a senseless optimism that refused ...
— The Lookout Man • B. M. Bower
... for the negotiation of western farm loans; Philadelphia alone was said to absorb $15,000,000 annually. The advantage to the West, if conditions were right, is too manifest to need explanation. But sometimes the over-optimistic farmer borrowed too heavily; sometimes the rates demanded of the needy westerners were usurious; often it seemed as if interest charges were like "a mammoth sponge," constantly absorbing the labor of the husbandman. The demand of the West for a greater currency supply ...
— The United States Since The Civil War • Charles Ramsdell Lingley
... two boys not yet fairly in their 'teens meet, at first aggressively, and then, each gradually overcoming this apprehension of the other, decide upon a close acquaintance and long comradeship? Their talk is firmly optimistic and they constitute much of the world. As for Ab and Oak, when there had come to them an ease in conversation, there dawned gradually upon each the idea that, next to himself, the other was probably the most important personage in the world, fitting companion and confederate of a boy who in ...
— The Story of Ab - A Tale of the Time of the Cave Man • Stanley Waterloo
... child King Edward VI." Of his life at this institution he has left us abundant and charming memorials in the Essays, "Recollections of Christ's Hospital," and "Christ's Hospital Five-and-thirty Years Ago,"—the latter sketch corrective of the rather optimistic impressions of ...
— The Best Letters of Charles Lamb • Charles Lamb
... appearance of "moving equilibria" of harmonious totalities than Hegel could guarantee the "higher unities" in which all contradictions should be reconciled. In Spencer's hands the theory of evolution acquired a more decidedly optimistic character than in Darwin's; but I shall deal later with the relation of Darwin's hypothesis to the opposition of ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... not echo Susan's optimistic prophecies. But Mrs. McGuire's own sky just now was overcast, which perhaps had something to do with it. Mrs. McGuire had troubles of ...
— Dawn • Eleanor H. Porter
... majority, of Henry Seymour, a bitter opponent of Clinton, to the canal commissionership made vacant by the resignation of Joseph Ellicott. The Governor's attention had been called to the danger of his candidate's defeat; but with optimistic assurance he dismissed it as impossible until Ephraim Hart, just before the election occurred, discovered that the cunning hand of Van Buren had accomplished his overthrow. "A majority of the canal commissioners are now politically ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... outwardly as blithe and optimistic as usual. When Anna pleaded with him to take a vacation, he either laughed her off in his most jovial manner, or riposted that she needed a vacation far more than he did, which may have been true; when Judge Barklay attempted to reason with him, he responded with respectful humour. He had seen ...
— Rope • Holworthy Hall
... come that final fracas in the Copau foundry on the bank of Canal Pyramus. Overly optimistic, Luke's new boss had struck out at the chunky, red-headed Earthman during an inconsequential argument and had promptly measured his length in a sand pile as a hamlike fist crashed home in return. They had picked ...
— Vulcan's Workshop • Harl Vincent
... medicine, recognized that there was a specific affinity of disease for individuals with more or less the same characteristic somatic and psychic traits and trends. Tuberculosis, for instance, was noted for its frequency in long-skeletoned, thin persons, remarkably optimistic. And the plethoric, choleric nature of the sufferer from gout has become proverbial. Before the era of the great bacteriologic discoveries of the eighties and nineties, the concordance of esoteric racial and personal markings was a great help in diagnosis to the physician. For he realized, though ...
— The Glands Regulating Personality • Louis Berman, M.D.
... about me, when I ought to have known that they could easily find some more interesting topic of conversation. I always went to extremes. I was up on a mountain of enthusiasm or down in the slough of despondency; always elated or depressed; optimistic beyond reason or submerged in pessimism; always the extremes—no happy medium for me. I never ...
— Confessions of a Neurasthenic • William Taylor Marrs
... and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies, but economic growth has remained sluggish. Sao Tome is also optimistic that significant petroleum discoveries are forthcoming in its territorial waters in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea. Corruption scandals continue to weaken the economy. At the same time, progress in the economic ...
— The 2001 CIA World Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... she said, "my father was robust and active in spite of his age. He was cheerful, busy, and optimistic. But he fell into a decline. It has not been a sudden sapping of his strength. If it were that I should not worry so much; I'd attribute it to disease. But every day something of vitality goes from him. He is fading almost from hour to hour, as slowly as ...
— The Night Horseman • Max Brand
... But the optimistic mouthpieces of the great American people, who are themselves deft theoreticians, are not to be convinced by mere theoretics. So it remains to demonstrate the existence of the class struggle by ...
— War of the Classes • Jack London
... schoolmates, and both were interested in writing and producing plays. Ibsen's son, Dr. Sigurd Ibsen, married Bjoernson's daughter, Bergilot. These two great writers were direct contrasts in nearly everything: Bjoernson lived among his people, Ibsen was reserved; Bjoernson played the role of an optimistic prophet, Ibsen, that of a pessimistic judge; the former was always a conciliatory spirit, the latter a revolutionist; and Bjoernson proved himself a patriotic Norwegian, Ibsen, a man of ...
— Short-Stories • Various
... not been destroyed by the Martians, so that communication between the Eastern and Western continents was uninterrupted. It was a proud day for America. Even while the Martians had been upon the earth, carrying everything before them, demonstrating to the confusion of the most optimistic that there was no possibility of standing against them, a feeling—a confidence had manifested itself in France, to a minor extent in England, and particularly in Russia, that the Americans might discover means to meet and ...
— Edison's Conquest of Mars • Garrett Putman Serviss
... shrewdly: 'I wonder if it isn't a very unfortunate thing for you to have met him.' I showed him radiantly how it was the world we must know, the world as it was, not a world expurgated and prettified with optimistic rainbows. 'Yes, yes,' said he; 'but this badness is such an easy, lazy explanation. Won't you be tempted to use it, instead of trying to ...
— Memoir of Fleeming Jenkin • Robert Louis Stevenson
... being a practical girl, did not linger long on the optimistic prospect. For to-night at least, "telling" seemed a matter too dreadful to contemplate. Colonel Dalhousie was an irascible and solitary widower with one son whom he had once been proud of; and this son, having been strangely compelled ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... an unduly optimistic view when she says the Germans mean the war to be decided out here. Nothing would suit us better. Meanwhile, we certainly seem to mean to go to Baghdad, and that will mean at least one other big fight: but so far they show no sign of moving us up to the firing line. This last show ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... it was now in the sphere of religious belief, but the traces of it never disappeared from his notions on morals and art. Shaftesbury's cheerfulness and geniality in philosophising were thoroughly sympathetic to Diderot. The optimistic harmony which the English philosopher, coming after Leibnitz, assumed as the starting-point of his ethical and religious ideas, was not only highly congenial to Diderot's sanguine temperament; it was a most attractive way of escape ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists (Vol 1 of 2) • John Morley
... the optimistic turn of my sagacity. She rested her eyes on my face as though in doubt whether I had enough femininity in my ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... time she was optimistic enough to take a villa at Beaujon on a fifteen years' lease, and had it refurnished in sumptuous fashion on credit. The first two instalments of the rent were met. When, however, the landlord called to collect the third one, he was put off ...
— The Magnificent Montez - From Courtesan to Convert • Horace Wyndham
... Aunt Ella, though naturally optimistic, did not, in her own heart, share Alice's hopeful anticipations. Perhaps Florence's somewhat extravagant account of the collision and the events which followed it led her to form the opinion that her nephew's escape from ...
— The Further Adventures of Quincy Adams Sawyer and Mason's Corner Folks • Charles Felton Pidgin
... generative organs only made the muscles tighten up and the circulation congest. They could not conceive themselves up and around, pursuing their normal life during such a time. However, as they have found by experience that this point of view is not an optimistic dream, they have broken up the confidence-game which their subconscious had been playing on them, and have gone on their ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... trout, saddle of deer, steaks of bear; but if through the sands, there was provided bacon or other coarser fare. Usually these crowds were joking and jolly, unless tempered by something requiring more sobriety, but always optimistic, for the fellow who became grouchy the while had generally abundant occasion to repent ...
— Trail Tales • James David Gillilan
... years, but it wore him out before his time. He was an erudite scholar and a prolific writer. Discarding the claims of Christianity to be the only 'divine revelation,' he based his clear and always optimistic theism on the broad facts of human experience. Ardently interested in social and political questions, he poured satire without stint on the religious defenders of slavery, and himself dared all risks along with the foremost abolitionists. Such a man could not but count for much; and though ...
— Unitarianism • W.G. Tarrant
... Neil saw the game from the bench, and Paul, once more at left-half, played an excellent game; but, try as he might, could not outdo Gillam. When it was over Neil declared the honors even, but Paul took a less optimistic view and would not ...
— Behind the Line • Ralph Henry Barbour
... to whose capabilities to write a topping revue Miss Verepoint had formed so optimistic an estimate, proved to be well-grown lads of about forty-five and forty, respectively. Of the two, Roland thought that perhaps R. P. de Parys was a shade the more obnoxious, but a closer inspection left him with the feeling that these fine distinctions were a little unfair with men ...
— A Man of Means • P. G. Wodehouse and C. H. Bovill
... lives in an unwholesome atmosphere, he will not see the sunshine because he prefers to stay down in the valley beneath the cloud of doubt and surmounted with the fog of hopelessness. The educated Negro pulpit is mainly optimistic and sees beyond its immediate surroundings. It sees to it that the leaven of sound doctrine and moral ethics are being put into the meal, and from personal developments believes that in process of time the whole lump will be leavened. The Negro pulpit ...
— Twentieth Century Negro Literature - Or, A Cyclopedia of Thought on the Vital Topics Relating - to the American Negro • Various
... is much more reliable, because he knows of the impending liability of fraud if he has misrepresented. Men averse to transforming an oral statement to writing have discredited themselves immediately. Men who mean to be honest may be optimistic in picturing prospects and be inclined to set an unreasonable value upon their property and extent of business. It may be easier to tell the absolute truth about one's liabilities, because they are such persistently real ...
— Up To Date Business - Home Study Circle Library Series (Volume II.) • Various
... lengthened. With him letter writing was never an effort. He wrote as easily as he talked, colloquially, without any attempt at style or set phrase. Soon he found himself tersely describing the water situation, forecasting the probabilities. As these were not too cheering, he frowned and added an optimistic sentence or two for general effect. He concluded with a hope that she would some time honour his country with a visit, when his ranch and all it contained—including its owner—would ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... this name; she complained of his coldness, of his indifference, of the air of commiseration with which he submitted to her love. "Oh, master, I am very unhappy!" At other times her letter was triumphant, optimistic; she seemed radiant, and the painter read her satisfaction between the lines; he divined her intoxication after those daring meetings in her own house, defying the count's blindness. And she told him everything, with shameless, ...
— Woman Triumphant - (La Maja Desnuda) • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... know, some optimistic persons who believe, or affect to believe, that Christianity is in due course destined to replace the ancient faiths in Japan. They point to what was effected by St. Francis Xavier in the sixteenth century, and they imagine ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... lived here long," he wrote his mother, "I think I should become as optimistic as the Secretary of Agriculture, even though the total produce of the original thirteen states should supply a still smaller fraction of the necessities of life required by their population. The Congressional Library is by far the finest ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... as are maintained by the governments of the Entente or enjoy their financial, military, technical or other support." There follows a statement that the extent of the concessions will depend on the military position. Chicherin proceeds to give a rather optimistic account of the external and internal situation. Finally he touches on the question of propaganda. "The Russian Soviet Government, while pointing out that it cannot limit the freedom of the revolutionary press, declares its readiness, in case of necessity to include in the general agreement ...
— Russia in 1919 • Arthur Ransome
... may judge from the experience of the past, too much caution cannot be exercised in setting up formal laws for the development of thought. According to the law of contradiction and reconciliation, a Schopenhauer must have followed directly after Leibnitz, to oppose his pessimistic ethelism to the optimistic intellectualism of the latter; when, in turn, a Schleiermacher, to give an harmonic resolution of the antithesis into a concrete doctrine of feeling, would have made a fine third. But it turned out otherwise, and ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... of land bounding Flying U coulee on the south was open range. It belonged to the government. The soil was not fertile enough even for the most optimistic of "dry land" farmers to locate upon it; and this was before the dry-land farming craze had swept the country, gathering in all public land as claims. J. G. Whitmore had contented himself with acquiring ...
— Flying U Ranch • B. M. Bower
... during the remainder of the summer, and when autumn came I was conscious of having undergone a mental change. Whereas I was formerly trusting, credulous, and optimistic, at least toward all except myself, I was become suspicious even of the seal of sincerity, weighed words, and applied the scalpel of analysis to others' motives as well ...
— A Romantic Young Lady • Robert Grant
... all grades found themselves powerless to struggle against this ever-recurring epidemic. Count Caffarelli, prefet of Calvados, in his desire to retain his office, treated the refractories with an indolence bordering on complicity, and continued to send Fouche the most optimistic reports of the excellent temper of his fellow-citizens and their inviolable ...
— The House of the Combrays • G. le Notre
... awake. Finally he dropped into a sleep so heavy that it was nearer to a torpor, and it was the sunlight that awoke him; sunlight that was warm in the room and proved how late the morning was. He swore in his astonishment and got up hastily, a great deal more optimistic than when he had lain down, and hurried out to feed the stock before he boiled coffee and ...
— Jean of the Lazy A • B. M. Bower
... went by, and still the treasure was unfound. Of course, as the unexplored space in the cave contracted, so daily the probability grew stronger that Fortune would shed her golden smile upon us before night. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the optimistic spirits of most were beginning to flag a little. Only Mr. Shaw, though banned as a confirmed doubter and pessimist, now by the exercise of will kept the others to their task. It took all Cuthbert Vane's loyalty, plus an indisposition to be ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... I hope she's still alive, but I'm not unduly optimistic. It seems that about a year ago, Dr. Hadron transposed to the Second Level, to study alleged proof of reincarnation which the Akor-Neb people were reported to possess. She went to Gindrabar, on Venus, and transposed to the Second Paratime Level, to a station maintained by Outtime ...
— Last Enemy • Henry Beam Piper
... Mrs. Twutter for three yards of butter—let her see you smiling, let her find you gay; be as bright and chipper as a new tin dipper, show you're optimistic, in the good old way! If you mope and mumble this good dame will tumble, and she'll tell her neighbors that your head is sore; no one likes a dealer who's a dismal squealer, so your friends will toddle to some other store. When the ...
— Rippling Rhymes • Walt Mason
... herself; Britain and France advancing hand-in-hand on the Western Front, and our enemies fumbling for peace—that was the gist of the message with which the PRIME MINISTER sped the parting Commons. But, fearing perhaps that he might have made them unduly optimistic, he concluded with a warning that not until next year could we expect to reap ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, Aug. 22, 1917 • Various
... was optimistic, as usual. "Better have a go for them," he said to Berridge and Marsh, ...
— Mike • P. G. Wodehouse
... only some five and twenty degrees of frost. And the sun shone brightly. There was no wind. It was an air rich in kindling, stimulating properties; an air that made life, movement, and activity desirable for all, and optimistic determination easy and natural ...
— Jan - A Dog and a Romance • A. J. Dawson
... schools, but the schools were dirty, like the children within them. This was not the fault of the children or their mothers. It was the fault of the idealists, who said: "The more dirt, the more prosperity." They drew patriotic, optimistic breaths of the flying powdered filth of the streets, and took the foul and heavy smoke with gusto into the profundities of their lungs. "Boost! Don't knock!" they said. And every year or so they boomed a great Clean-up Week, when everybody ...
— The Magnificent Ambersons • Booth Tarkington
... poisoned his own? A daughter perhaps—with the eyes of his mad sister Alice? Or a son—with the contradictions and weaknesses, without the gifts, of his father? Men have different ways of challenging the future. But that particular way called paternity had never in his most optimistic moments appealed to Manisty. ...
— Eleanor • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... Flack's, a lifetime of bee-dodging and carpet-beating and water-lugging, and reflected that, but for a few innocent words—words spoken, mark you, in a pure spirit of kindliness and brotherly love with the object of putting a bit of optimistic pep into sister!—he might have been in a position to touch a millionaire brother-in-law for the needful whenever he felt disposed, the iron entered into Nutty's soul. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... may seem too optimistic to some who can marshal an array of facts to prove that bigotry, narrowness, and the whole family of ills begotten by isolation still thrive in the country. It is true that our picture is not all of rose tints. But what ...
— Chapters in Rural Progress • Kenyon L. Butterfield
... on the job the work went on very rapidly, yet without error. The Celestial Queen was finished, tested, and found perfect, one full day ahead of James' most optimistic estimate for construction alone. The ...
— The Galaxy Primes • Edward Elmer Smith
... inordinate elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand. They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view, the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the fear that we are losing the sense ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... tears came once more as she read the ingenuous scrawl! What centuries ago it seemed since she had written that! She bit her lip hard but in spite of herself she cried—for her lost illusions—for her mother—for that optimistic outlook upon life which never would come back. She had learned much since that smiling "pitcher" was taken—what "mortgages" mean, for instance—that poverty has more depressing depths than the lack of servants and horses, and that "marrying well," as she ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... successes in Galicia. But in the west of Europe the Allies could at most but retard without arresting the advance of the Germans, whose aim was to defeat the French and then concentrate all their efforts on the invasion of the Tsardom. Despite assurances of an optimistic tenor there appeared to be no serious hope of defending Paris, nor were effective local measures adopted for the purpose; and on September 3 the French Government, against the insistent advice of three experienced Cabinet Ministers, suddenly moved to Bordeaux, and earned ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... of Christianity that has yet appeared in history," writes an exponent of this view, at one time a Christian pastor. In this connection the reader may recall what was said in chapter xiv. on Japanese Ambition and Conceit, qualities depending on the power of seeing visions. We note, in passing, the optimistic spirit of New Japan. This is in part due, no doubt, to ignorance of the problems that lie athwart their future progress, but it is also due to the vivid imaginative faculty which pictures for them the glories of the coming decades when they shall lead not only the Orient, but also the Occident, ...
— Evolution Of The Japanese, Social And Psychic • Sidney L. Gulick
... This was the optimistic spirit Cousin and I left behind us when we set out at sunset. Cousin was in a new mood. There was a certain wild gaiety, rather a ferocious gaiety, in his bearing. His drawn face had lost some of the hard lines and looked almost boyish and his eyes were feverishly alight. He seemed possessed ...
— A Virginia Scout • Hugh Pendexter
... was supplemented by the urgent invitations of his old friends there, and Mr. Emerson, who was a practical man as well as a philosopher, substantiated his arguments by throwing into the scale a concrete dwelling. It was an edifice which not even the most imaginative and optimistic of house-agents would have found it easy to picture as a sumptuous country-seat; it was just four wooden walls and a roof, and they had been standing for a hundred years at least. The occupants of this ...
— Hawthorne and His Circle • Julian Hawthorne
... right"? Let {59} Mr. Wells once take his principles seriously enough to apply them, and personal as well as social reform is at an end. Perhaps it may be permissible to say that of all forms of Determinism the most irrational is that optimistic form which deprecates discontent with things as they are as a mark ...
— Problems of Immanence - Studies Critical and Constructive • J. Warschauer
... cannon food, were thinking. He did it, too, without attracting any attention to himself, by a deft question here, a suggestion there, and then more questions, always indirect, but leading in some fashion to the point. Curiously, but truly, his suggestions were not optimistic, and after he talked with a group of soldiers and passed on the effect that he left was depressing. He, too, looked across toward the Northern lines, and, civilian though he was, he knew that their tremendous infolding curve was more than twice as great as ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... squabbling, and, when the work is done, the last state of that casualty will be worse than the first, and it will proceed to the Base a melancholy collection of all the most dilapidated parts in the area, for which even the most optimistic authority at the back of beyond will see ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... from tasting bitter, is simply one of the "terrible and beautiful mysteries" which make the world so interesting—especially to gentlemen of comprehensive natures, who combine a taste for rook-pie with a taste for optimistic theology. ...
— Flowers of Freethought - (Second Series) • George W. Foote
... blessed with optimistic natures were already planning a banquet at which the crew of the Neptune were to be entertained within an ...
— Studies in love and in terror • Marie Belloc Lowndes
... islands, were anxious that we should go; they doubted whether Western Europe had any knowledge of the Italian methods of administration. And if the immediate result of our journey would be to call down upon themselves—as indeed it did—a savage wind, they were optimistic enough to feel that it would eventually produce a whirlwind for their oppressors.] ... The S.S. Porer, 130 tons, was flying at the stern the temporary flag of white, blue, white in horizontal stripes which had ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... much chance of that happening," he said in his usual optimistic manner. "If things get pretty bad we can make a foray on the pantry of the shack where our friend puts up when over here. Knowing that he's fond of his grub, with oceans of the long green to lay in ...
— Eagles of the Sky - With Jack Ralston Along the Air Lanes • Ambrose Newcomb
... "Beulah Land" as he went, but, with the swift closing of the door behind him, abandoned that pathetically optimistic hymn prematurely, ...
— The Flirt • Booth Tarkington
... and methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution wherein he has refused admiration and respect for the crimes then ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... absolute freedom from the restraint that an almost unlimited deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us. Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us. What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. This is what I hope to see echoed ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... is inwardly straining to be better, that we are easily fooled into supposing that some slight easement of external circumstance will at once release the progressive forces of mankind and save the race. When, for example, one compares the immense amount of optimistic expectancy about a warless world with the small amount of radical thinking as to what really is the matter with us, he may well be amazed at the unfounded regnancy of the idea of progress. We rejoice over some slight disarmament ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... represents a strange mixture of epigenesis and pangenesis, and is not entirely devoid of "virtues." It is, however, a bold attempt to explain embryonic development in terms commensurate with his time, and it embodies the same optimistic belief that the mechanism of embryogenesis lay accessible to man's reason and logical faculties that similarly led Descartes and Gassendi to comprehensive interpretations of embryonic development comprising a maximum of ...
— Medical Investigation in Seventeenth Century England - Papers Read at a Clark Library Seminar, October 14, 1967 • Charles W. Bodemer
... rather disconnected utterances of the convivial Thomas. They had come upon each other in a bar-room, but Dick had succeeded in getting the showman away from the place before he reached the maudlin stage. The day's business had been good. Braddock was cheerful, almost optimistic in consequence. He vociferously thanked his lucky sun, not his stars. Convinced that this was an uncommonly clever bit of paraphrasing, he repeated it at least a dozen times with great unction, always appending a careful explanation so that Dick would ...
— The Rose in the Ring • George Barr McCutcheon
... young; for with the young lies fulfilment. Such epochs are ever pressing with the question, how is the future to be shaped? Our answer depends on the theory of human disposition, and in these epochs the theory is always optimistic. Rousseau was saved, as so many thousands of men have been alike in conduct and speculation, by inconsistency, and not shrinking from two mutually contradictory trains of thought. Society is corrupt, and society is the work ...
— Rousseau - Volumes I. and II. • John Morley
... bad conditions in crowded homes the net increase is diminished. To those of us who are hopeful of improvement by eugenics it is pleasing to note that Mr. Booth—somewhat unlike Mr. Kidd in his well-known "Social Evolution"—is optimistic in his conclusion that "on the whole it may fairly be expected that concurrently with a rising standard of health we may see a fall in birth-rate as well as death-rate, and thus have no cause to fear, as the result of better sanitation, ...
— Civics: as Applied Sociology • Patrick Geddes
... wrote it! One thing, and one thing only may be urged in my favour. Although I seemingly consented to the marriage with Mary Tregony, I hoped that something would happen to make it impossible. It all lay in the distance, and that made everything easy to an optimistic youth. I never breathed a word concerning my marriage with Jean. Indeed, I came to look upon it as something that was utterly illegal, and that I could never be expected to stand by what was only, after all, a mere farcical thing, the act of ...
— The Day of Judgment • Joseph Hocking
... was to return to Paris, but felt certain that inasmuch as the orders recalling me had been sent before Mr. Bullitt's arrival, there was every possibility of my being returned to Petrograd. He was most optimistic about the future and felt that the Allies must soon take some definite stand regarding Russia, and that the result of the Paris negotiations would almost surely be favorable to the Soviet Government. He said that ...
— The Bullitt Mission to Russia • William C. Bullitt
... that I mean merely to regard myself sub specie eternitatis, in which case I am personifying in the sense of free imagination. In the religion of enlightenment the divine attitude tends to belong to the poetry and eloquence of religion rather than to its cognitive intent. This is true even of optimistic and idealistic religion. The love and providence of God are less commonly supposed to warrant an expectation of special and arbitrary favors, and have come more and more to mean the play of my own feeling about the general central conviction of the favorableness of the cosmos to my deeper or moral ...
— The Approach to Philosophy • Ralph Barton Perry
... worth living, for the fact that it absolutely is so would vouch for itself, and the problem disappear in the vanishing of the question rather than in the coming of anything like a reply. But we are not magicians to make the optimistic temperament universal; and alongside of the deliverances of temperamental optimism concerning life, those of temperamental pessimism always exist, and oppose to them a standing refutation. In what is called 'circular insanity,' phases of melancholy succeed phases of ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... meridional in our improvidence. We are so essentially of to-day that we behave as if to- morrow no more concerned us than yesterday. We have taught ourselves to believe that it will all come out right in the end so long that we have come to act upon our belief; we are optimistic fatalists. ...
— Henry James, Jr. • William Dean Howells
... that he ever essentially departed from them. Of his genuine religious feeling his writings, give ample testimony. His nature was at heart devout; his ideas of life, of death, and of what lies beyond, were essentially cheerful, hopeful, optimistic. He did not care to talk much on theological points; but he believed in the supremacy of good in the world and ...
— Unitarianism in America • George Willis Cooke
... One of the more optimistic members of the chorus thought that this might show some connection with the Church of England. But Mrs. Pennington ...
— The Window-Gazer • Isabel Ecclestone Mackay
... almost unlimited deference to European thought and prejudice has imposed upon us. Masquerading in the so-called nationalism of Negro clothes cut in Bohemia will not help us. What we must arrive at is the youthful optimistic vitality and the undaunted tenacity of spirit that characterizes the American man. This is what I hope to see echoed ...
— Edward MacDowell • Lawrence Gilman
... Your scheme Is but an optimistic dream, Whose 'shadowy incentives' seem The merest spooks. Better the ancient plans, I deem, ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Feb. 20, 1892 • Various
... an area in which even the optimistic Ordnance Survey (who in the chatty little notes they append to their maps, characterised the local water supply as "abundant though varying in quality") considered wheeled transport as impracticable. In consequence our nodding acquaintanceship with camels ripened ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... intricate and involved nature of the problem. Their contention is true. It is a complicated and delicate problem, and all kinds of difficulties are sure to arise in connection with any plan of solution, while no plan will bring all the benefits hoped for by its more optimistic adherents. Moreover, under any healthy plan, the benefits will develop gradually and not rapidly. Finally, we must clearly understand that the public servants who are to do this peculiarly responsible and delicate ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... revived with the very first cup of tea, and we went for our usual evening stroll through the paddocks, with all our old appreciation; and on our return found the men stretched out on the grass beyond the Quarters, optimistic and happy, sipping at further cups of tea. (Sam's kettle was kept busy ...
— We of the Never-Never • Jeanie "Mrs. Aeneas" Gunn
... period of his career was engaged in the real estate business. About ninety per cent of Prouty's residences were listed with him. In the beginning, while taking descriptions of the properties and making a confidential note of the lowest possible sums which would be accepted, he was busy and optimistic. But, this completed, business subsided suddenly. His few inquiries for properties came from buyers who had no cash available. The breath he expended in "working up deals" which came to nothing when the critical point was reached ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... constantly overruled and made an instrument of good. On this subject we must say more later. Here I need only add that a sunny confidence in the ultimate triumph of good shines from the writings of most of the mystics, especially, I think, in our own countrymen. The Cambridge Platonists are all optimistic; and in the beautiful but little known Revelations of Juliana of Norwich, we find in page after page the refrain of "All shall be well." "Sin is behovable,[42] but all shall be well, and all manner ...
— Christian Mysticism • William Ralph Inge
... ready to crack a joke with anyone, and possibly there was no more optimistic man in the whole of Britain. To the boys and girls of Wood Green he was a popular hero. He was usually clad in a "cowboy" hat, red flannel shirt, and buckskin breeches, and his hair hung down to his shoulders. ...
— The Mastery of the Air • William J. Claxton
... work is done, the last state of that casualty will be worse than the first, and it will proceed to the Base a melancholy collection of all the most dilapidated parts in the area, for which even the most optimistic authority at the back of beyond will see ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 150, May 10, 1916 • Various
... higher thought enthusiasts are often too optimistic. While the former poisoned their lives and paralyzed their God-given faculties and powers by dismal dread of hell's fire and damnation, our modern healers and Scientists have drifted to the other extreme. They tell us there is no sin, no pain, no suffering. If that be true, there is also no ...
— Nature Cure • Henry Lindlahr
... Balzac, strengthened all his powers of resistance and exalted his will and his energy. He had a healthy and strongly optimistic nature, upon which chagrins, reverses and sorrows acted like so many stimulants; he was never so resolute as after a defeat. M. Sedillot had barely begun the liquidation of his business affairs, the printing house and foundry, when he gave himself up passionately and exclusively to his literary ...
— Honor de Balzac • Albert Keim and Louis Lumet
... must issue an optimistic report—this very day!" he said, smiling. "The cash-box is nearly empty—good! Then we will state that the workers have abundant means to carry on the fight for another year if need be, and then ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... his hands and face, with none too much food, with many of his comrades dead or wounded, with a shell-storm shrieking and howling about him, and has then had to surrender, could hardly be expected to appear high-spirited and optimistic. Yet it has long been the custom of the Allied correspondents and observers to base their assertions that the morale of the enemy is weakening and that the quality of his troops is deteriorating on the demeanor of prisoners fresh ...
— Italy at War and the Allies in the West • E. Alexander Powell
... next opportunity Clerambault whispered to Gillot that he ought to be optimistic for two, and cheer Moreau up; and thus each found help in the need of helping the other, according to the great principle of life: "Give, and it shall be given ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... not so but I have given the thought exactly, a thought, as you see, full of affection and with a very faint perfume of poetry about it. You will not accuse me, therefore, of being too optimistic when I affirm that the Sakai, in spite of his semblance to a wild man of the bush, savage, suspicious and superstitious as he is, is susceptible of rapid intellectual progress whenever the right means are used in his ...
— My Friends the Savages - Notes and Observations of a Perak settler (Malay Peninsula) • Giovanni Battista Cerruti
... His parents were denying themselves in order to provide the means for his support, and, while he was duly appreciative of their goodness, he could not help taking it more or less as a matter of course. He was optimistic with regard to the future, falling into the common error of gifted young artists that, because of their artistic success, financial success must of necessity follow. He had yet to be proved in the school of adversity, and he had not long to wait. But I shall let the ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume I. • Samuel F. B. Morse
... the third quarter of 1995, but the difficult year fed growing dissatisfaction with the ruling party, led to a crisis of confidence in President ZEDILLO'S ability to lead, and spurred increased tensions within the ruling party. While the ZEDILLO administration is optimistic that 1996 will bring some recovery - the government is forecasting 3% growth and 21% inflation - Mexico will face several key vulnerabilities, including the financial health of the banking sector, shaky investor confidence that could be easily jarred by more political or economic ...
— The 1996 CIA Factbook • United States. Central Intelligence Agency.
... vague plans changed a dozen times as he found each idea unworkable. His emotional balance was also erratic—though that was natural, since the stars were completely berserk in what was left of the sky. He seemed to fluctuate between bitter sureness of doom and a stupidly optimistic belief 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 ...
— The Sky Is Falling • Lester del Rey
... people. By 1910 the terrible pall of depression and despair which had settled upon the nation as a result of the failure of the First Revolution began to break. There was a new generation of college students, youthful and optimistic spirits who were undeterred by the failure of 1905-06, confident that they were wiser and certain to succeed. Also there had been an enormous growth of working-class organizations, large numbers of unions and ...
— Bolshevism - The Enemy of Political and Industrial Democracy • John Spargo
... told Ward that he would come a most howling cropper if he did not look out. But I have never yet happened to find the man who was inclined to take my warnings seriously, and Jack Ward, at any rate, was so naturally optimistic, that I might have known that he would take no notice ...
— Godfrey Marten, Undergraduate • Charles Turley
... attention to himself, by a deft question here, a suggestion there, and then more questions, always indirect, but leading in some fashion to the point. Curiously, but truly, his suggestions were not optimistic, and after he talked with a group of soldiers and passed on the effect that he left was depressing. He, too, looked across toward the Northern lines, and, civilian though he was, he knew that their tremendous ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... accounts of agents he had audited for twenty years, was in a state of stubborn, uncompromising rage which closely resembled the dementia of a dumb animal, and Mr. Gunterson could do nothing with him. Still the Vice-President struggled manfully to keep his head above water, to seem cheerful and optimistic. He came from his room one morning, ...
— White Ashes • Sidney R. Kennedy and Alden C. Noble
... silence of the night.—And then fee would discard such hurtful thoughts; he would deny them; he would try to be confident, and optimistic, and to believe in human truth; and he would believe. How often had his illusions been brutally destroyed!—But always others springing into life, always, always.... He ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... appoint you first lieutenant. I guess that nurse is all right, though she doesn't seem to be unduly optimistic." ...
— Old Rose and Silver • Myrtle Reed
... paid was of course high, because of the uncertainty of her security, and the arithmetic of lovers is often sketchy and optimistic. Yet they had very glorious times after that return. They determined they would not go to a Pleasure city nor waste their days rushing through the air from one part of the world to the other, for in spite of one disillusionment, their tastes were ...
— Tales of Space and Time • Herbert George Wells
... words in Scripture—which are not to be ruled out of it by any easy-going, optimistic, rose-water system of a mutilated Christianity—there are awful words in Scripture, concerning what you and I must come to if we live and die in our sins, and there would be no message of forgiveness worth the proclaiming to men, if it had nothing to say about ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... vibrations which you wish to receive. And if you wish to avoid vibrations of a certain kind, the best way is to rise above them in your own mind, and to cultivate the mental states opposite them. The positive always overcomes the negative—and optimistic mental states are always positive to pessimistic ...
— Clairvoyance and Occult Powers • Swami Panchadasi
... and center their attention on the generative organs only made the muscles tighten up and the circulation congest. They could not conceive themselves up and around, pursuing their normal life during such a time. However, as they have found by experience that this point of view is not an optimistic dream, they have broken up the confidence-game which their subconscious had been playing on them, and have gone ...
— Outwitting Our Nerves - A Primer of Psychotherapy • Josephine A. Jackson and Helen M. Salisbury
... guests made a spirited attempt to appear unconcerned, the signs of care were plainer in their faces than when they last met, and there were times when the witty sally fell curiously flat. The strain was beginning to tell, and even the most optimistic realized that the legislature of the State was more inclined to resent than yield to any further pressure that could be exerted by the cattle-barons. The latter were, however, proud and stubborn men, who had unostentatiously directed ...
— The Cattle-Baron's Daughter • Harold Bindloss
... some optimistic persons who believe, or affect to believe, that Christianity is in due course destined to replace the ancient faiths in Japan. They point to what was effected by St. Francis Xavier in the sixteenth ...
— The Empire of the East • H. B. Montgomery
... poems like Andrea del Sarto, this is the unbroken tone of his poetry. Calvinism, asceticism, pessimism in any form, he rejects. He sustains his position not by argument, but by hope and assertion. It is a matter of temperament: he is optimistic because he was born so. Different from the serene optimism of Shakespeare's later life, in The Tempest and The Winter's Tale, in that it is not, like Shakespeare's, born of long and deep suffering from the contemplation of the tragedies of human life, it bears, in that degree, less of solace ...
— Browning's Shorter Poems • Robert Browning
... the people of Arkansas, Mississippi, and Louisiana, who live, in flood time, in the precarious safety afforded by the levees, is characterized by the same optimistic fatalism that is to be found among the inhabitants of the slopes of ...
— American Adventures - A Second Trip 'Abroad at home' • Julian Street
... Randolph's romantic fancy. It was pleasant to think that the patron of his own fortunes might be in some mysterious way the custodian of hers. The money was placed to her credit—a liberal sum for a girl so young. The large house in which she lived was sufficient to prove to the optimistic Randolph that this income was something personal and distinct from her family. That his unknown benefactor was in the habit of mysteriously rewarding deserving merit after the fashion of a marine fairy godmother, I fear did not strike him as ...
— Trent's Trust and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... genuine experience upon which American optimistic fatalism rests, is equivalent, because of its limitations, to a dangerous inexperience, and of late years an increasing number of Americans have been drawing this inference. They have been coming to see themselves more as others see them; and as an introduction to a ...
— The Promise Of American Life • Herbert David Croly
... until in his mind's eye he beheld Margaret Elizabeth and Uncle Bob seated beside the hearth. For aught he knew, it might be Augustus McAllister making an evening call, but the Candy Man was just then too determinedly optimistic to harbour ...
— The Little Red Chimney - Being the Love Story of a Candy Man • Mary Finley Leonard
... Philistines, and an inordinate elevation in public consideration of rich men simply because they are rich, are characteristics of this little point of time on which we stand. They are not the only characteristics; in a reasonably optimistic view, the age is distinguished for unexampled achievements, and for opportunities for the well-being of humanity never before in all history attainable. But these characteristics are so prominent as to beget the fear that we are losing the sense ...
— Quotes and Images From The Works of Charles Dudley Warner • Charles Dudley Warner
... international donors, who have pledged increased assistance in 2001. Considerable potential exists for development of a tourist industry, and the government has taken steps to expand facilities in recent years. The government also has attempted to reduce price controls and subsidies. Sao Tome is also optimistic that substantial petroleum discoveries are forthcoming in its territorial waters in the oil-rich waters of the Gulf of Guinea. Corruption scandals continue to weaken ...
— The 2002 CIA World Factbook • US Government
... grandfather was too poor a trader to succeed in pelts, so he invested a little money in rocky pastures around upper Manhattan: this has kept the clerks of the family bankers busy ever since. I am an optimistic vagabond, enjoying life in the observation of the rather ludicrous busyness of other folk. In short, Doctor, I am a corpulent Hamlet, essentially modern in my cultivation of a joy in life, debating the eternal question with myself, but lazily ...
— The Voice on the Wire • Eustace Hale Ball
... girl, did not linger long on the optimistic prospect. For to-night at least, "telling" seemed a matter too dreadful to contemplate. Colonel Dalhousie was an irascible and solitary widower with one son whom he had once been proud of; and this son, ...
— V. V.'s Eyes • Henry Sydnor Harrison
... at ease and feeling more optimistic every minute. Three men still believed in him, which was much. Also, the crowd could not flurry him as it did some of the others who were not accustomed to so great an audience; rather, it acted as a tonic and brought back the poise, the easy self-confidence which ...
— The Happy Family • Bertha Muzzy Bower
... colorless years in which study and farm work alternated. Throughout this period he had continued to incur the rancor of Jud, whose youthful scrapes had gradually developed into brawls and carousals. The Judge periodically extricated him from serious entanglements, and Barnabas continued optimistic in his expectations of a time when Jud should "settle." On one occasion Jud sneeringly accused David of "working the old man for a share in the farm," and taunted him with the fact that he was big enough and strong enough to hustle for himself without ...
— David Dunne - A Romance of the Middle West • Belle Kanaris Maniates
... heard that Kut had fallen. As a nation we take reverses with consummate coolness. Whatever one thought inwardly, work went on as usual, and in the men's lines there was very little comment. Up to the last moment Rumour was optimistic. She spread a most mysterious yarn about the ship that tried to escape Turkish vigilance and get to Kut with supplies. It was, she said, full of gold. For what purpose she did not specify, but it sounded promising. This ...
— In Mesopotamia • Martin Swayne
... catch and mount one of these habitually rageful and intractable beasts was no child's play under the best of conditions; but now, when silence and time were such important considerations, it might well have seemed quite hopeless to a less resourceful and optimistic man than the son of the ...
— Thuvia, Maid of Mars • Edgar Rice Burroughs
... bullied and even wheedled his way along. It was fight, fight, fight, and no let-up, from the first thing in the morning till nightfall. His private office saw throngs every day. All men came to see him, or were ordered to come. Now it was an optimistic opinion on the panic, a funny story, a serious business talk, or a straight take-it-or-leave-it blow from the shoulder. And there was nobody to relieve him. It was a case of drive, drive, drive, and he ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... automobile and only grudgingly admit that perhaps the motor truck is of some use. But in the beginning there was hardly any one who sensed that the automobile could be a large factor in industry. The most optimistic hoped only for a development akin to that of the bicycle. When it was found that an automobile really could go and several makers started to put out cars, the immediate query was as to which would go fastest. ...
— My Life and Work • Henry Ford
... After all, this girl had fought lions, tigers, pumas, cannibals, and alligators in her time with a good deal of success. There might be a sporting chance of victory for her when she moved a step up in the animal kingdom and tackled his mother. He was not unduly optimistic, for he thought she was going out of her class; but he felt faintly hopeful. He allowed himself to ...
— The Girl on the Boat • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... rosebushes which grew plentifully along the headlands, was set out behind where the house was to stand, to divide the lawn from the garden, Pearl said, and although to the ordinary eye they were a weedy looking lot, to Pearl's optimistic vision they, were already aglow with fragrant bloom. Aunt Kate sent down east to her sister Lib for roots of sweet Mary, ribbon-grass, and live-forever, all of which came, took root, and grew ...
— The Second Chance • Nellie L. McClung
... the usual accessories—a basin of water, cotton-wool, iodine—and placed them on the little table by the bed, feeling a sudden grave doubt about her patient. Had she been too optimistic? If she had, then so had the night-nurse, who only last evening had remarked to her how well the old man was going on. Yet she was impressed by the doctor's ability to discern things hidden from her eyes. Perhaps all along he had regarded it ...
— Juggernaut • Alice Campbell
... not serve the town for more than another seven or eight years even if the flow needed to maintain adequate water quality is left out of account, and the summers of 1965 and 1966 made even those figures seem slightly optimistic. Both city and State have declared themselves in favor of an upstream major reservoir at Sixes Bridge, also a 1963 proposal. And elsewhere throughout the Basin, a good number of smaller places ...
— The Nation's River - The Department of the Interior Official Report on the Potomac • United States Department of the Interior
... who presumably knew what the public desired to be informed on, thought that the news which would sell best was that concerned with wooden bats and leather balls, and strong young men in flannels. Michael had heard with a sort of tender incredulity Mrs. Falbe's optimistic reflections, and had been more than content to let her rest secure in them; but was the country, the heart of England, like her? Did it care more for cricket matches, as she for her book, than for the maintenance ...
— Michael • E. F. Benson
... guarantee a sufficient supply of labor, made an effort to secure married men only, and even to investigate them prior to their coming. Differences in recruiting methods may also explain why some employers and labor agents hold a very optimistic view of the negro as a worker, while others despair of him. The reason why Pittsburgh has been unable to secure a stable labor force is doubtless realized by the local manufacturers. Married negroes come to the North to stay. They desire ...
— Negro Migration during the War • Emmett J. Scott
... a diamond in his shirt front. The district wished its representative "to stand up with the best of them," and certainly some of the constituents would have been ashamed to have been represented by a bricklayer. It is part of that general desire to appear well, the optimistic and thoroughly American belief, that even if a man is working with his hands to-day, he and his children will quite likely be in a better position in the swift coming to-morrow, and there is no need of being too closely associated with common working ...
— Democracy and Social Ethics • Jane Addams
... and still the treasure was unfound. Of course, as the unexplored space in the cave contracted, so daily the probability grew stronger that Fortune would shed her golden smile upon us before night. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that the optimistic spirits of most were beginning to flag a little. Only Mr. Shaw, though banned as a confirmed doubter and pessimist, now by the exercise of will kept the others to their task. It took all Cuthbert Vane's loyalty, plus an indisposition to be called a slacker, to strive against the temptation to renounce ...
— Spanish Doubloons • Camilla Kenyon
... known to us, and from the engineer's point of view, Edison and the simplest laborer, Smith or Jones, are basically the same; their powers or capacities are exponential, and, though differing in degree, are the same in kind. This may seem optimistic but all engineers are optimists. They deal only with fact and truth. If they make mistakes, if their bridges break down, then, no matter how clever their sophistry, they are adjudged criminal. Like severity must be made the rule and practice toward all those who control the ...
— Manhood of Humanity. • Alfred Korzybski
... one who had such an aversion for Calvinism, the view of human nature taken by the author is what some would call optimistic, and the tone with regard to the religious honesty of non-Catholic Americans extremely hopeful. Perhaps herein was Dr. Brownson's reason for an adverse, or almost adverse, criticism on the book in his Review. He had given the Questions of the Soul ...
— Life of Father Hecker • Walter Elliott
... long delay Simmy's cheery voice came singing—or rather it was barking—into her ear. This had been the greatest day in the life of Simeon Dodge. From early morn he had gone about in a state of optimistic unrest. He was more excited than he had ever been in his life before,—and yet he was beatifically serene. His brow was unclouded, his eyes sparkled and his voice rang with all the confidence of extreme felicity. There ...
— From the Housetops • George Barr McCutcheon
... our great philosophers and our great men of action are optimists. So, too, our most potent men of letters have been optimists in their books and in their lives. No pessimist ever won an audience commensurately wide with his genius, and many optimistic writers have been read and admired out of all measure to their talents, simply because they wrote of the sunlit side of life. Dickens, Lamb, Goldsmith, Irving, all the well-beloved and gentle humorists, were optimists. Swift, ...
— Optimism - An Essay • Helen Keller
... ethnologist's view of history. He does not pretend to be either a priest or a prophet. He claims neither to possess the final truth nor to foresee it. He is, therefore equally unwelcome to the dogmatist, the optimistic naturalist and the speculative philosopher. He refuses any explanations which either contradict or transcend human reason; but he insists that human reason is one of the causal facts which he has to consider; and ...
— An Ethnologist's View of History • Daniel G. Brinton
... German newspapers on President Wilson's note of June 9 was reported by THE TIMES staff correspondent in Berlin on June 12 as being "surprisingly restrained and optimistic." Captain L. Persius, the naval critic of the Berliner Tageblatt, which is close to Dr. von Bethmann-Hollweg, writing under the caption, "On the Way ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 4, July, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... that the whole subject gives to a great majority of the people, is so urgent, that the paper has been criticized as pessimistic, and as an impatient cry against evils that are speedily being rectified. We may say that the optimistic view of evils never did much to correct them, and that those who are patient with wrongs will never create a sentiment against them. To us, this seems the voice of a prophet pleading for righteousness to man and righteousness in ...
— American Missionary, Vol. XLII., June, 1888., No. 6 • Various
... Henry Seymour, a bitter opponent of Clinton, to the canal commissionership made vacant by the resignation of Joseph Ellicott. The Governor's attention had been called to the danger of his candidate's defeat; but with optimistic assurance he dismissed it as impossible until Ephraim Hart, just before the election occurred, discovered that the cunning hand of Van Buren had accomplished his overthrow. "A majority of the canal commissioners are now politically opposed to the Governor," declared ...
— A Political History of the State of New York, Volumes 1-3 • DeAlva Stanwood Alexander
... any religious doctrine is feeble and precarious, but the opinion of its necessity for moral and social purposes almost universal; and when those who reject revelation, very generally take refuge in an optimistic Deism, a worship of the order of Nature, and the supposed course of Providence, at least as full of contradictions, and perverting to the moral sentiments, as any of the forms of Christianity, if ...
— Autobiography • John Stuart Mill
... an optimistic view of the case that wouldn't have occurred to me, Ted. Still, we'll hope ...
— Phebe, Her Profession - A Sequel to Teddy: Her Book • Anna Chapin Ray
... for years past Sir Walter Besant is chiefly remarkable as an example of what may be done by a steadfast cheerfulness in style. His creed has always been that fiction is a recreative art, and we have no better sample of a manly and stout-hearted optimist than he. He is optimistic of set purpose, and sometimes his cheerfulness costs him a struggle, for he is tender-hearted and clear-sighted, and he is the Columbus of 'the great joyless city' of the East. He has had a double aim—to ...
— My Contemporaries In Fiction • David Christie Murray
... for you," Ross Metaxa growled at Ronny. "It's too bad she's indispensable. I'd love to fire her. Look, you go in and see Sid Jakes. Seems to me he said something about Tommy Paine this morning. Maybe it's a lead." He came to his feet. "So long and good luck, Ronny. I feel optimistic about you. I think ...
— Ultima Thule • Dallas McCord Reynolds
... garden; but this longing had faded with age, leaving only in the breast of the uncommunicative old woman a vague tenderness for plants and animals. It was, perhaps, this tenderness which made her cling so fervently to her view from her window, a view in which the most optimistic eye would at first have failed ...
— The Early Short Fiction of Edith Wharton, Part 1 (of 10) • Edith Wharton
... Schaffman's poem, "Think of Times Yet Coming", shows the same innate sense of rhyme and metre that has distinguished his earlier work. Only the conclusion lacks perfect ease and naturalness. Mr. Schaffman has so far confined his Muse to optimistic opinions and moral maxims; we hope that in the near future he will vary his efforts and attempt to reflect more of his general reading in his poetry. The field is large for one so happily favored ...
— Writings in the United Amateur, 1915-1922 • Howard Phillips Lovecraft
... fact, she had shown neither hope nor excitement from the moment he came back to her and started to tell his message. But if she showed neither hope nor excitement for herself, surely she gave Dick still fewer grounds for any optimistic foresights. ...
— Riders of the Silences • John Frederick
... meet them every day—the expression of the face, the movement and gesture, in anger, terror, dismay, scorn, conceit, tenderness, elation, triumph.... Whatever the mood, they could not have looked or acted otherwise—it is life itself. An optimistic life in which joyousness prevails, and the very woes and discomfitures are broadly comical to us who look on—like some one who has sea-sickness, or a headache after a Greenwich banquet—which are about the most tragic things he has ...
— Social Pictorial Satire • George du Maurier
... strata of wind enabling them to get close enough to the earth to use their eyes, while again they had to use the telescopes. They covered a wide section but as day after day passed, and they were no nearer their goal, even Tom optimistic as he usually was, began to have a ...
— Tom Swift and his Air Glider - or, Seeking the Platinum Treasure • Victor Appleton
... vicissitudes and trials. It had frequently been on the border of extinction. But the crisis in its troubled history had at last been passed. A new era, more wonderful and more successful than even its most optimistic friends dared look for, was about to begin. The foundations had been laid, perhaps not always wisely, but at least firmly and hopefully. The College was now to go forward—for again, as in the past, its sign-posts pointed onward. The faith of its founder was at last to be justified. It remained ...
— McGill and its Story, 1821-1921 • Cyrus Macmillan
... thought he groaned aloud. When he contemplated a lifetime at Flack's, a lifetime of bee-dodging and carpet-beating and water-lugging, and reflected that, but for a few innocent words—words spoken, mark you, in a pure spirit of kindliness and brotherly love with the object of putting a bit of optimistic pep into sister!—he might have been in a position to touch a millionaire brother-in-law for the needful whenever he felt disposed, the iron entered into Nutty's soul. ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... these predestined folk meet. They say that love flames instantly at such a meeting, and that the couple will recognize each other though the whole social scale divide them. They say that Love will conquer all obstacles and unite the yearning pair. They are a sentimental, optimistic lot, who thus declaim. Martin, when he thought the matter over, inclined to their belief. Only—the trouble was that Ruth did not seem to exactly recognize or welcome her ...
— Fire Mountain - A Thrilling Sea Story • Norman Springer
... stripping a problem of its shell of nonessentials. He had become what the ineffective call a pessimist. He had learned the primer lesson of large success—that one must build upon the hard, pessimistic facts of human nature's instability and fate's fondness for mischief, not upon the optimistic clouds of belief that everybody is good and faithful and friendly disposed and everything will "come out all right somehow." The instant Madelene suggested Whitney as the cause, Arthur's judgment echoed approval; ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... Columbus with less fulness of detail, came the polished historian Prescott, whose "History of Ferdinand and Isabella" was published in 1837. This ardent and laborious scholar was, like Irving, constitutionally inclined to the optimistic view of his leading characters. To magnify the virtues and to minimize the faults of their heroes has always been the besetting sin of biographers. The pomp and picturesque circumstance of the Spanish court, the splendid administrative abilities of Ferdinand, the beauty, ...
— Great Men and Famous Women. Vol. 5 of 8 • Various
... few towns of its size are more ripe, more complete, or, I should suppose, in better humor with themselves and less disposed to envy the responsibili- ties of bigger places. It is truly the capital of its smil- ing province; a region of easy abundance, of good living, of genial, comfortable, optimistic, rather indolent opinions. Balzac says in one of his tales that the real Tourangeau will not make an effort, or displace him- self even, to go in search of a pleasure; and it is not difficult to understand the sources of this amiable cynicism. ...
— A Little Tour in France • Henry James
... a metallic "ting chee chee chee" that sounds as though it had been struck on a triangle. Then a silence of exactly nine seconds and repeat. As regularly as clock-work this performance goes on. Time him as often as you will, you can never convict him of a second's variation. And he is so optimistic and willing, and his notes are so golden with the ...
— The Forest • Stewart Edward White
... enterprise. Lord Curzon, writing before Russia's strategic railways were complete, thought it feasible for Russia speedily to throw 150,000 men into Afghanistan, feed them there, and send on 90,000 of them against the Indus[348]. After the optimistic account of the problem of Indian defence given by Mr. Balfour in the speech above referred to, it is well to remember that, though Russia cannot invade India until she has conquered Afghanistan, yet for that preliminary undertaking ...
— The Development of the European Nations, 1870-1914 (5th ed.) • John Holland Rose
... the whole Allied expedition. Green-eyed jealousy, provincial jealousy, just plain foolish jealousy tormented the man who was soon disillusioned as to the glories to be won in that forlorn expedition but who never exhibited anything but an undaunted optimistic spirit. He was human. When he was among the soldiers and talking to them it was not hard for them to believe the tale that after all he was an American himself, a Western Canadian who had started his career as a military man with the ...
— The History of the American Expedition Fighting the Bolsheviki - Campaigning in North Russia 1918-1919 • Joel R. Moore
... of the Menorah at Ohio State University, proved to be the most successful in its history. In accord with the nature and purpose of our organization, we strove to be academic, sociable and non-sectarian, and accomplished this end, even beyond the expectations of the more optimistic. During the year the Society carried on a lecture course in Biblical History, by Professor Morgenstern, of the Hebrew Union College, in such a creditable manner as to attract attention even outside the University. The lectures of Dr. Israel Friedlaender and Dr. H. M. Kallen met with ...
— The Menorah Journal, Volume 1, 1915 • Various
... down, and smoothed the delicate dark fur of her muff. She hardly knew how to begin at the very beginning like this. She did not want to hurt any one's feelings. How could she tell this childlike, optimistic creature that to put Mathilde to living in surroundings like these would be like exposing a naked baby on a mountaintop? It wasn't love of luxury, at least not if luxury meant physical self-indulgence. ...
— The Happiest Time of Their Lives • Alice Duer Miller
... off from the main herd," the optimistic reports announced. "We shall deal with the main herd first. This year the sacrifice will have to be made, but it will be the last. Scientists have at last hit upon an infallible toxin which will utterly destroy this ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science, November, 1930 • Various
... preserving his life to himself, while paying the keenest attention to his daily duties. In his office he is immersed in affairs which require the exercise of vigilant common-sense, and knowledge of life and literature. At his home he is a serene and optimistic philosopher, contemplating the forces that make for our civilization, and musing over the deep problems of man's occupation of this earth. In 1893 appeared anonymously a volume entitled 'God in His World,' which attracted instantly wide attention in this country and in ...
— Library of the World's Best Literature, Ancient and Modern, Vol. 1 • Charles Dudley Warner
... he peeled them for supper His crippled leg was thrust out straight, his hat was perched precariously over one ear because of the slanting sun rays through the window, and a half-smoked cigarette waggled uncertainly in the corner of his mouth while he sang dolefully a most optimistic ...
— Cow-Country • B. M. Bower
... look at Mr. Batty's mouth—would not be giving a ball at all, but they had their eyes on Miss Henrietta for that half-witted son of theirs. She was sure of it. And Miss Caroline was not fit to go, it would be the death of her. Cook was optimistic. It would do Miss Caroline good; she was always the better ...
— THE MISSES MALLETT • E. H. YOUNG
... widely known as the author of "Is Life Worth Living?" He was the only man. Professor Ruskin said, who really understood him—referring to "The New Republic." But while Mallock saw the reactionary and pessimistic side of his Oxford teacher, there was a progressist and optimistic side which does not appear in his "Mr. Herbert." That was discovered by another man whose career, short as it was, proved even more influential. Arnold Toynbee was one of the Professor's warmest admirers and ablest pupils: ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... wants to be better, is inwardly straining to be better, that we are easily fooled into supposing that some slight easement of external circumstance will at once release the progressive forces of mankind and save the race. When, for example, one compares the immense amount of optimistic expectancy about a warless world with the small amount of radical thinking as to what really is the matter with us, he may well be amazed at the unfounded regnancy of the idea of progress. We rejoice over some ...
— Christianity and Progress • Harry Emerson Fosdick
... still cost roughly a billion dollars to equip a flight and maintain a personnel of twenty men for a year," the President told him. "I've checked into that, and even this estimate is based on the most optimistic projection. So you can see there's no use in continuing now. We'll never solve our problems by attempting to colonize the moon ...
— This Crowded Earth • Robert Bloch
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