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More "Pessimistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... was written, I have read in the Outdoor World for April, 1912, the views of a veteran sportsman and writer, Mr. Emerson Hough, on the wild-life situation as it seems to him to-day. It is a strong utterance, even though it reaches a pessimistic and gloomy conclusion which I do not share. Altogether, however, its breadth of view, its general accuracy, and its incisiveness, entitle it to a full hearing. The following is only an extract from a lengthy article ...
— Our Vanishing Wild Life - Its Extermination and Preservation • William T. Hornaday
... I know?"—"What does any one know?"—of this shrewd pagan spirit has nothing in it of the ache of pessimistic disillusion. It has never had any illusions. It has taken things as they appear, and life as it appears, and it is so close to the kindly earth-mud beneath our feet that it is in no fear ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... great influence on invention as any other emotion. Do we not know that melancholy and even profound sorrow has furnished poets, musicians, painters, and sculptors with their most beautiful inspirations? Is there not an art frankly and deliberately pessimistic? And this influence is not at all limited to esthetic creation. Dare we hold that hypochondria and insanity following upon the delirium of persecution are devoid of imagination? Their morbid character is, on the contrary, the well whence strange inventions ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... are or not," returned the pessimistic youth. "Wait till there's only one piece o' pie left at dinner some day. You'll have ter have it. Marm'll say so. But if you was a boy—an' I could lick ye—ye wouldn't dare take ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... to hear the judge controvert my friend's pessimistic philosophy, but with a brusque "good-night" hurried away. The window banged behind me, a sharp commentary on my rudeness. The iron gate clanged again, and I was off down the hill, ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... with an optimistic trumpet call to service; there is not a single pessimistic note sounded. A man expresses his belief and he at once goes to work. To the fact that men were so willing to lead a strenuous Christian life in those early times is due in large measure the marvellous spread ...
— Studies in the Life of the Christian • Henry T. Sell
... learned Hawaiian with whom the author has enjoyed much conference persists in taking a most discouraging and pessimistic view of this mele. It is gratifying to be able to differ from him in this matter and to be able to sustain one's position by the consenting opinion of other Hawaiians equally accomplished as the learned friend just ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... know about these 'last hour conversions,'" said the pessimistic Bess. "I should wring the tears out of the shoulder of my coat and bottle 'em. Only tears I ever heard of Linda's shedding! And they may prove to be crocodile tears ...
— Nan Sherwood's Winter Holidays • Annie Roe Carr
... I marvelled this sophistic fowl to utter pessimistic Fustian, which so little meaning—little relevancy bore To the rule of me and SOLLY; but, although it may sound folly, This strange fowl a strange resemblance to "Our Only General" wore, To the W-LS-L-Y whose ...
— Punch, or The London Charivari, Volume 101, October 31, 1891 • Various
... drama was suggested by two or three rather meagre pages of the 'Islendingasaga' of Sturla Thordsson (ed. Vigfusson, ch. 146). To my notion, the poet has succeeded admirably in reproducing the cool coloring, the ironic-pessimistic attitude, that uncompromisingly masculine sentiment we know so well in their refreshing acerbity from the best sagas. Not the least meritorious thing in the play, by the way, is the very slight insistence on Thorolf's relations ...
— Poet Lore, Volume XXIV, Number IV, 1912 • Various
... Alfred's knowledge goes, Bill Brown's pessimistic views of farm life were not accepted by any save Alfred's immediate family. Alfred carried a copy of his address, "A Glimpse of Nature, or Back to the Farm" in his pocket. Mrs. Field preserved Bill Brown's ...
— Watch Yourself Go By • Al. G. Field
... Manapuri one can see enacted, as on a stage, the last act in the great American tragedy. To be succeeded, doubtless, by other and possibly greater tragedies. My thoughts at that period of suffering were pessimistic in the extreme. Sometimes, when the almost continuous rain held up for half a day, I would manage to creep out a short distance; but I was almost past making any exertion, scarcely caring to live, and taking absolutely no ...
— Green Mansions - A Romance of the Tropical Forest • W. H. Hudson
... of his speculative temper, was ever returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in Empedocles on AEtna, in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is most worthy, his worship of nature ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... and pessimistic person. She always leapt to meet trouble half way and invariably lost her nerve upon the least opportunity to do so. The peace of 'The Magnolias' had long offered her a fitting sanctum, for here life moved with the utmost simplicity and regularity; but, though as old as he was, ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... know," said the pessimistic Mr. Duckett. "I wonder whether they'll have another shot for the treasure when they ...
— Dialstone Lane, Complete • W.W. Jacobs
... situation, Frank Merriwell had not given up hope. He was young, and he still believed that all evil things come to an evil end, and all good things eventually triumph. He had not grown cynical and pessimistic. ...
— Frank Merriwell's Bravery • Burt L. Standish
... formerly physician to the Elmira Reformatory, New York. "Sexuality" (he wrote in a private letter) "is one of the most troublesome elements with which we have to contend. I have no data as to the number of prisoners here who are sexually perverse. In my pessimistic moments I should feel like saying that all were; but probably 80 per cent, would be a fair estimate." And, referring to the sexual influence which some men have over others, he remarks that "there ...
— Studies in the Psychology of Sex, Volume 2 (of 6) • Havelock Ellis
... moment why he wanted to restore the preaching friars, he might have found it difficult to answer. He was by no means imbued with the missionary spirit just then; his experience at Chatsea had made him pessimistic about missionary effort in the Church of England. If a man like Father Rowley had failed to win the support of his ecclesiastical superiors, Mark, who possessed more humility than is usual at twenty-one, did not fancy that he should be successful. The ambition to become a friar ...
— The Altar Steps • Compton MacKenzie
... not be so pessimistic," replied Ibarra, rising to his feet. "The teniente mayor has invited me to attend a town meeting to be held in the tribunal. Who knows but that some plan for ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... cultivated, developed and guided by the awakened Will, may grasp as it unfolds. Knowing this the advanced man no longer despairs, and, recognizing his real nature, and his possibilities, as he awakens into a consciousness of his powers and capabilities, he laughs at the old despondent, pessimistic ideas, and discards them like a worn-out garment. Man on the Mental Plane of consciousness is like a huge elephant who knows not his own strength. He could break down barriers and assert himself over nearly any condition or environment, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... formal manner, ill temper, or a pessimistic outlook, on the contrary, will handicap the sale of the ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... present judges can not see their way clear to follow the standard, why, appoint those that will, for as every fair minded man agrees, the dogs should follow the standard and not the standard follow the dogs. It is needless to add that I do not share in the pessimistic view taken by many lovers of the dog who think he will be permanently injured by the differences of opinion that prevail as to the type, etc., and the personalities that sometimes mar the showing of the dog, for I am of the same opinion as was probably ...
— The Boston Terrier and All About It - A Practical, Scientific, and Up to Date Guide to the Breeding of the American Dog • Edward Axtell
... teachers, referred to above. That there is much in the present situation, both of encouragement and discouragement, is patent. Unfortunately, most of us shut our eyes to one or the other set of facts and are wildly optimistic or pessimistic, accordingly. That there may be no misunderstanding of my position, let me say that I agree with the late Dr. J. L. M. Curry in stating that: "I have very little respect for the intelligence or the patriotism of the man who doubts the ...
— The Negro Farmer • Carl Kelsey
... spirits "into thin air," has the last word; and the last word is as the first: "we are such stuff as dreams are made on, and our little life is rounded with a sleep." The easy-going persons who reluct at the idea of a pessimistic Shakespeare should turn the pages of Troilus and Cressida, Measure for Measure, and Timon of Athens. What we guessed as we read Hamlet and Lear grows a certainty ...
— Visions and Revisions - A Book of Literary Devotions • John Cowper Powys
... bitter, but, in spite of himself, it was no longer cynical. He could not indulge himself in that pessimistic scepticism which had aided him in bearing his poverty, and the restless craving of sense and spirit which had accompanied it. His enthusiasm for art was falling away; as a faith it had failed him in his hour of need. In its stead another ...
— The Unclassed • George Gissing
... he also thinks that pressure on the labour market has forced both rates lower than the course of prices would lead one to expect. In so far as these causes are concerned, Udny Yule states, the fall is quite normal and pessimistic views are misplaced. Udny Yule, however, appears to be by no means confident that his explanation covers a large part of the causation, and he admits that he cannot understand the rationale of the connection between marriage-rates ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... and simple relation to the real physical prosperity of the community, that the nominal wealth of a community in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, measured nothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and an increase of confidence meant an inflation of credit and a pessimistic phase a collapse of this hallucination of possessions. The new standards, this advocate reasoned, were to alter all that, and it seemed to ...
— A Modern Utopia • H. G. Wells
... then, shaking his head dubiously. He was not going to spend Christmas with Edward and Geraldine, and perhaps the prospect of having to cook and eat his Christmas dinner all alone made him pessimistic. ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1902 to 1903 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Certainly, the indiscriminate reading of vice investigations is dangerous for many young people,—for young men because some of them are allured into personal investigations, and for young women because they get an exaggerated and pessimistic view of all sexual problems. For the intelligent reader who wants the general information that every public-spirited citizen should have, the well-known book by Jane Addams will serve both as an outline and an encyclopedia of the social evil. Social workers and some educators ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... letter to Twichell takes up politics and humanity in general, in a manner complimentary to neither. Mark Twain was never really a pessimist, but he had pessimistic intervals, such as come to most of us in life's later years, and at such times he let himself go without stint concerning "the damned human race," as he called it, usually with a manifest sense of indignation that he should be a member of it. In much of his later ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... after two months in bed, this could not but be a trying journey under the most favourable circumstances, and the prospect as held out by his pessimistic bearer was pretty gloomy—no boats available, and ...
— A Holiday in the Happy Valley with Pen and Pencil • T. R. Swinburne
... on the side of the higher rather than the lower thought, the nobler rather than the baser. He deliberately takes the optimistic rather than the pessimistic view of everything, the helpful, rather than the cynical, because he knows that to be fundamentally the true view. By looking continually for the good in everything that he may endeavour to strengthen it, by striving always to help and never to hinder, he ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... in oil?" Judson's tone was pessimistic. "Not a thing doin', Gorry. Awful slow bunch, that lump of nuts I'm in with on this. Mentioned your name to one or two of 'em; but no enterprise. Boneheads that wouldn't know a white man from a crane." That he understood what Gorry understood became clear as he continued: "Friend ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... begin to call names, John Mayrant—but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—my optimistic eye sees that American dealing adequately ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... leaving the pessimistic atmosphere of Capetown with relief, went by sea to Durban, the defence of which was entrusted to the Royal Navy, and reached Pietermaritzburg on November 25. By this time the situation had improved all along the line, and it seemed that it might still ...
— A Handbook of the Boer War • Gale and Polden, Limited
... are they going to do?" responded the Master, reverting to the pessimistic mood that was daily becoming more frequent with him; "what chance is there for a gentleman in this damned country? You might as well have a mill-stone round your neck as an Irish property these times! What do you suppose ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... carrion, a crucified lion, a dying woman, the jeering of ribald mercenaries, the cackle of M. Homais. It is all one. If Flaubert deserved prosecution, it was not for making vice attractive, but for expressing with invasive energy that personal and desperately pessimistic conception of life by which ...
— The George Sand-Gustave Flaubert Letters • George Sand, Gustave Flaubert
... stimulate the brain. Many break the laws of sleep and the laws of digestion and the laws of nerve sobriety. They spend their brain capital. Then they grow hopeless toward home and business. Ill-health spreads a gloom over all life. Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise. The jaundiced eye yellows the landscape. The sweetest music rasps like a file upon the nervous ear. Thomas Carlyle's pessimism was largely physical. He overworked upon his life of Oliver ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... the object lesson of her quick dexterity at 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 ...
— The Second Generation • David Graham Phillips
... understandably pessimistic about the ship's ability to lift herself from the surface of even a moderate-sized planet like Earth, looked with new respect upon the man who had designed the power plant ...
— Unwise Child • Gordon Randall Garrett
... the notion of gradual development. The eschatological teaching of Jesus has its place along with the ethical, and may be regarded not as annulling, but rather reinforcing the moral ideals which He proclaimed.[33] There is nothing pessimistic in Christ's outlook. His teaching concerning the last things, while inculcating solemnity and earnestness of life as become those to whom has been entrusted a high destiny, and who know not at what hour they may be called to give an account of their ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... there were so many other worlds greater than this. It was one of the first great shocks involved in the change from ancient to modern scientific views, and I do not doubt it was responsible for a great deal of the pessimistic philosophizing that came in ...
— The Meaning of Infancy • John Fiske
... End House and the vicinity of Edwin Clayhanger; she was not happy at the prospect of postponing the consideration of plans for her own existence; she was not happy at the prospect of Sarah Gailey's pessimistic complainings. She was above happiness. She was above even that thrill of sharp and intense vitality which in times past had ennobled trouble and misery. She had the most exquisite feeling of triumphant self-justification. She was splendidly conscious ...
— Hilda Lessways • Arnold Bennett
... Lublin in thinking that they might have overestimated the Austrian army and underestimated the Russian. In this case they might face the danger of an invasion of Germany itself from Russia. Owing to the heterogeneous character of the Austrian army with its many races and the many pessimistic prophesies that have been made about the loyalty of the Slav portions of Austria, which were fulfilled it is said by the mutiny of some Slav regiments, it looked as if such apprehensions ...
— The Story of the Great War, Volume I (of 8) - Introductions; Special Articles; Causes of War; Diplomatic and State Papers • Various
... now," said Madeleine. "We know your love for paradox. But not to-day. There's no time for philosophising today. Besides, you are in a pessimistic mood, and that's ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... a merry heart hath a continual feast,' which shows that if we are truly happy, everything about us will appear brighter and more delightful. Again, it says: 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.' How true this is; you never saw a sour, gloomy pessimistic person who was in real good health, while the one who shows the most gladsome face is either in splendid physical condition or else has risen above his pains and distress in his appreciation of God's blessings. They are always believing that 'it ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... extremely dangerous for the country, inasmuch as we are now breeding mainly from our worst stocks (the feeble-minded are very prolific), while our best families are stationary or dwindling. Without denying the general truth of this pessimistic conclusion,[19] it may be pointed out that the miners are, physically at least, above the average of the whole population, and that the very low birth-rate of residential districts is partly due to the presence in large numbers of unmarried ...
— Outspoken Essays • William Ralph Inge
... Croak!" replied Hawkins, sourly. "Go on and croak till your dying day, Griggs. If any one ever offers a prize for a pessimistic alarmist, you take my advice and compete. You'll win. I'm going to start the engine and get out ...
— Mr. Hawkins' Humorous Adventures • Edgar Franklin
... recovered his old spirit and refused to be discouraged by my pessimistic view of his expedition. He laughed gayly and pointed across the country where half a dozen spires of smoke were rising. There was the railroad. There was the great highway where his real journey was to start. There was the beginning of his great adventure. ...
— The Soldier of the Valley • Nelson Lloyd
... analysis of passion, at first playfully tender in its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... most memorable talk because it opened out quite new horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out of touch with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite objects, of any concerted ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... attacked on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... found himself anticipating the moment when he should be telegraphing the amount of the clean-up to Helen Dunbar, to Harrah, and to Harrah's good-naturedly pessimistic friends. Bruce ransacked his brain for somebody in the world to envy, but there was ...
— The Man from the Bitter Roots • Caroline Lockhart
... Catspaw could judge, very nearly three miles an hour, it seemed probable that by two o'clock that night they would be at anchor off Portsmouth Harbour. Of course, there was always the possibility of bad weather or a broken cable, but the Catspaw's crew declined to be pessimistic. They were having a royal good time. There was enough danger in the enterprise to make it exciting, and, being normal, healthy chaps, excitement was better than food. Perry proclaimed his delight at last finding an ...
— The Adventure Club Afloat • Ralph Henry Barbour
... last dark or pessimistic words spoken at St. Saviour's by Jean Jacques; and they were said to the Clerk of the Court, who could not deny the truth of them; but he wrung the hand of Jean Jacques nevertheless, and would not leave him night ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... that they were face to face with an impossible situation, and he began to feel inclined to share Mr. Halfpenny's pessimistic opinions as to the usefulness of these researches. But Professor Cox-Raythwaite was not to be easily daunted, and he was no sooner baulked in one direction than he hastened to ...
— The Herapath Property • J. S. Fletcher
... after the war in the spirit in which our affairs were conducted before the war is about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer, working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has come into human ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... power for good, in spite of the obvious unpopularity which an incessant critic cannot fail to draw down upon himself. The most pessimistic of us secretly crave a little respite when for half an hour we may forget the circumambient and all-pervading gloom: music, or an entertaining book, or a dear friend lifts the burden from us. And then comes our uncompromising pessimist and chides ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... occasion of the centennial celebration of our independence it was fit that some expression should go forth from us that should in some measure give contradiction to the impression that the graduates of Harvard College take a pessimistic view of their country and its institutions. [Applause.] Certainly I know that it is not true, and I wish to have that sentiment expressed here. Our college takes no official part in celebrating the nation's first completed century; ...
— Modern Eloquence: Vol II, After-Dinner Speeches E-O • Various
... where did Joe sleep, and where had Ellen gone, and the cook? But, above all, they were fired with a desire to see the little house around the block. Was there any place to play? Were there any boys next door? Raoul, with pessimistic foreboding, was convinced that there were only girls next door. Where would they sleep, and where would papa sleep? She told them the fairies ...
— The Awakening and Selected Short Stories • Kate Chopin
... midst of a lively discussion of this pessimistic view of the inequalities of life, in which desert and capacity are so often put at disadvantage by birth in beggarly conditions, and brazen assumption raises the dust from its chariot wheels for modest merit to plod along in, the Professor swung himself off his horse ...
— Baddeck and That Sort of Thing • Charles Dudley Warner
... my thinking apparatus around and make it operate from the other end? Surely he should not interfere in even so slight a particular with the "Plan of the Creator," who may have been moving "in a mysterious way his wonders to perform" when he gave the supposedly pessimistic bend to my mind. Nay, if my Christian friend do but have the rheumatism, should he not refrain from poulticing himself, lest he throw the celestial machinery out of gear? If changes wrought in religion, science, government, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... accumulating documents and methodically arranging them in a method that refuses to be concealed, advances in a rectilineal order, step by step, and with a measured gait, to a solid truth which he did not wish to be either evasive or complex. Highly pessimistic and a little affecting to be so, just as Renan was optimistic and much affected being so, he believed in the evil origin of man and of the necessity for him to be drastically curbed if he is to remain inoffensive. He has written a history of the Revolution ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... slightest signs of Kirby's presence in our rear, and my faith was strong that his party had either lost our trail, or been turned aside by fear of encountering Indians. In this respect Kennedy remained more pessimistic than I, yet even in his mind confidence began to dawn that we had outstripped our enemies, both white and red, and that a few miles more must bring us in safety to some pioneer settlement. The poor condition ...
— The Devil's Own - A Romance of the Black Hawk War • Randall Parrish
... with a gesture of despair. He sat down in the high armchair that stood on the hearth, and tapped on the floor with one foot in pessimistic thought. ...
— Barlasch of the Guard • H. S. Merriman
... a new period—perhaps to be joyful, perhaps otherwise; anyway, a period on which it is necessary to enter as far as possible with confidence. From the general point of view that is not an easy matter as things stand. I am bound to say I am getting pessimistic about the War. The chief trouble is the total lack of action that characterises it. This grovelling in ditches is a rotten, foolish business in many ways—though to me sitting in comfort and safety behind the lines is ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... not be surprised if some day I meet Eileen somewhere, because Dana and I are going about more than you would believe possible. I heartily join with you in wishing her every good that life can bring her. I don't want to be pessimistic, but I can't help feeling, Linda, that she is taking a poor way to win the best, and I gravely doubt whether she finds it in the spending of unlimited quantities of the money of a coarse man who stumbled upon his riches accidentally, as has many a man ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... so pessimistic. It would be much more sensible to think of marriage as solid meadow-land after your present scramble ...
— The Grey Wig: Stories and Novelettes • Israel Zangwill
... doom," he writes, kept him from sleep, his fears being equal to his hopes. He was especially sensitive and discouraged by unforeseen expenditure, while his sanguine partner, Roebuck, on the contrary, continued hopeful and energetic, and often rallied his pessimistic partner on his propensity to look upon the dark side. He was one of those who adhered to the axiom, "Never bid the devil good-morning till you meet him." Smiles believes that it is probable that without Roebuck's support Watt could never have gone on, but that ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... verdict about Quisante—she gave it with an air of laboured reasonableness—was that he proved worse on the whole than even she had anticipated. This pessimistic view was due in part to the constant and wearing difficulty of getting Fred Wentworth to be civil to him; yet May Gaston was half-inclined to fall in with it. The attitude of offence which he had at first maintained towards her was marked by peevishness, not by dignity, and when ...
— Quisante • Anthony Hope
... found her true allies. They were not attached to the higher civilisation. The higher civilisation, so far, had treated them inconsiderately, at sparrow clubs. The Owl talked a good deal about the low moral tone of the human race in this respect, and was pessimistic about it, failing to perceive that higher types of organisms always like to signify their superiority over lower ones by shooting them, or otherwise making their lives a burden. The Owl, however, was a very talented bird, and one felt ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... priesthood! What with the pilgrimages, and the sale of relics, and les benefices—together with the charges for seeing the wonders of the Mont—what a trade they did! It is only the Jews, who, in their turn, now own us, up in Paris, who can equal the priests as commercial geniuses!" And our pessimistic Parisian, during the next half-hour, gave us a prophetic picture of the approaching ruin of France, brought about by the genius for plunder and organization that is given to ...
— In and Out of Three Normady Inns • Anna Bowman Dodd
... agreed Earle, gloomily. There was silence in the hut for a few moments as the two friends faced the doom that seemed to be impending; but neither of them was of a pessimistic nature, and presently Earle turned to his ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... incredulously. Let our enemies laugh at our pretensions to penetrate the world-mysteries of Aryavarta," as a certain critic recently expressed himself. However pessimistic may be our critics' views, yet, even in the event of our conclusions not proving more trustworthy than those of Fergusson, Wilson, Wheeler, and the rest of the archeologists and Sanskritists who have written about India, still, I hope, they will not be less ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... fresh phase of development in the '70's of the last century, the careful study of the people, two men headed the movement, Glyeb Ivanovitch Uspensky and Nikolai Nikolaevitch Zlatovratsky. Uspensky (1840) took the negative and pessimistic view. Zlatovratsky (1845) took the positive, ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... which must be the main thing in any poet's work, Arnold is either very austere or very pessimistic. If the feeling is moral, the predominant impression is of austerity; if it is intellectual, the predominant impression is of sadness. He was not insensible to the charm of life, but he feels it in his ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... myself to organise troops expected from England. I am, therefore, withdrawing the garrisons at Naauwpoort and Stormberg. I shall send Gatacre's division on arrival to Natal, and with Methuen's and Clery's try to keep the main line open, and to relieve Kimberley. I do not wish to be pessimistic, but it seems to me I shall have to wait until ...
— History of the War in South Africa 1899-1902 v. 1 (of 4) - Compiled by Direction of His Majesty's Government • Frederick Maurice
... corroboration of his belief that the world was rotten and man a peripatetic evil. Without a word he rounded the end of his counter and made earnest onslaught upon his customer. Hopkins was no man to serve as a punching-bag for a pessimistic tobacconist. He quickly bestowed upon Freshmayer a colorado-maduro eye in return for the ardent kick that he received from that dealer in goods for ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... of justice, and therefore happiness for the small peoples, or whether we will face a period of oppression more or less gilt edged. And as I always believed that wisdom and truth will triumph in the end, I want to believe, too, that, in spite of the pessimistic news reaching me from the different sides of the Balkan countries, there will be no war among them in order to justify those who do not believe in the vitality of the ...
— Current History, A Monthly Magazine - The European War, March 1915 • New York Times
... was pessimistic, even for a man who sees the traffic which is his keenest interest threatened by a marauding gang of land pirates. Maybe it was the wearing hours of McLagan's nagging that caused his mood. Maybe it was an inclination ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... paper yet," answered the singer lady in the subdued voice she always used in addressing Mother Mayberry's pessimistic neighbor. ...
— The Road to Providence • Maria Thompson Daviess
... land," said Cap'n Ira, in the same pessimistic way. "But it ain't had a coat of shack fish for three years and this spring not much seaweed. Besides that, after the potatoes are planted, who is to hoe 'em and ...
— Sheila of Big Wreck Cove - A Story of Cape Cod • James A. Cooper
... him. The "accursed roosters" unseasonably wakened him in the morning, the "silly cackle" of the chickens prevented him from writing. Flowers bored him and the weather was always too cold or too hot, too damp or too dusty. Butterflies filled him with pessimistic forebodings of generations of cabbage worms. Moths suggested ruined coat collars—only at night, before our fire, with nature safely and firmly shut out, did he regain his ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... belongs to the Harrison school of Positivists. I went with her to one of Mrs. Orr's receptions, where we met Robert Browning, a fine looking gentleman of seventy years, with white hair and mustache. He is frank, easy, playful, and a good talker. Mrs. Orr seemed to be taking a very pessimistic view of our present sphere of action, which Mr. Browning, with poetic coloring, was ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... maintains a hopeful, joyous demeanor so that his followers may also be joyous or hopeful and thus be energized to their best. Morale is the state of emotion of a group; it is raised when joyous, energizing emotions are set working in the group and is lowered when pessimistic deenergizing emotions become dominant. A city or a nation becomes energized with good news and success and deenergized ...
— The Nervous Housewife • Abraham Myerson
... need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A stern, ascetic view of ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... responsible for the paralysis of Japanese civilization, which, like oft-tapped maple-trees, began to die at the top. This was in accordance with its theories and its literature. In the Bible there is, possibly, one book which is pessimistic in tone, Ecclesiastes. In the bulky and dropsical canon of Buddhism there is a whole library of ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... for your letter, my dear fellow. It's less pessimistic than I expected, and gives me the impression that I may regard you as a Prop. I shall follow your advice rigidly, though I must juggle some of the details, as Caspian has taken advantage of the poor little girl's love for her father, and practically ...
— The Lightning Conductor Discovers America • C. N. (Charles Norris) Williamson and A. M. (Alice Muriel)
... with weighty arguments. He was sharply attacked by the Redemptorist Godts,(598) who marshalled a great number of authorities in favor of the sterner view. The controversy cannot be decided either on Scriptural or traditional grounds. In our pessimistic age it is more grateful and consoling to assume that the majority of Christians, especially Catholics, will be saved.(599) If we add to this number not a few Jews, Mohammedans, and heathens, it ...
— Grace, Actual and Habitual • Joseph Pohle
... Cornewall Lewis[428] and by Clarendon, the latter standing at the moment in a position midway between the Whig and Tory parties[429]. Yet Russell, with more cause than others to mistrust Seward's policy, as also believing that he had more cause, personally, to resent it, was less pessimistic and was already thinking of at least postponing immediate hostilities in the event of an American refusal to make just recompense. On December 16 he wrote to Palmerston: "I incline more and more to the opinion that if the answer is a reasoning, and not a blunt offensive answer, we should send ...
— Great Britain and the American Civil War • Ephraim Douglass Adams
... this is too bad of you," she said. "Your point of view is almost as pessimistic as the detectives', or the newspapers'. I ...
— Ashton-Kirk, Investigator • John T. McIntyre
... inflection of the voice and a smile, say: "Ah! c'est gai la-bas—and monsieur was well amused while in that beautiful country?" "ah!—tiens! c'est gentil ca!" they will exclaim, as you enthusiastically continue to explain. They never dull your enthusiasm by short phlegmatic or pessimistic replies. And when you are sad they will condone so genuinely with you that you forget your disappointments in the charming pleasantry of their sympathy. But all this continual race for pleasure is destined in the course of ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... Prince Lichnowsky affected to be ignorant. But it appears from a letter, which M. Paul Cambon[45] wrote to his Foreign Office on July the 24th, 1914, that Prince Lichnowsky had returned to London from Berlin about a month before and had "displayed pessimistic views as to the relations between St. Petersburg and Berlin." Cambon adds that the English Foreign Office and his other diplomatic colleagues had all been struck "by the anxious appearance of Prince Lichnowsky since ...
— The Evidence in the Case • James M. Beck
... constantly followed by friendly furtive looks from old labourers who passed them on the road, and nodded as they went by. But when the daily war news was being discussed he had a way of sitting quite silent, unless his opinion was definitely asked. When it was, he would answer, generally in a rather pessimistic spirit, and escape the conversation as soon as he could. And the one thing that roused him and put him out of temper was the easy complacent talk of people who were sure of speedy victory ...
— Elizabeth's Campaign • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... meantime his friend may somewhere lose one and enable him to get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, is that he fully realises ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... when he meets the ration parties behind the lines that night, announces to a platoon Sergeant that we have won a great naval victory. The platoon Sergeant, who is suffering from trench feet and is a constant reader of a certain pessimistic halfpenny journal, replies gloomily: "We'll have had heavy losses oorselves, too, I doot!" This observation is overheard by various members of the ration party. By midnight several hundred yards of the firing-line ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... trees, great boulders and rocks, and a hill site for the house with a broad outlook, and a railroad station conveniently near. The friend who finally found the place for me had begun his quest with the pessimistic remark that I would better wait for it until I got to Paradise; but two years later he telegraphed me that he had discovered it on this planet, and he was right. I have only eight acres of land, but no one could ask a more ideal site for a cottage; and on the place is my ...
— The Story of a Pioneer - With The Collaboration Of Elizabeth Jordan • Anna Howard Shaw
... have behaved like a gentleman, and that any discourtesy of hers cannot detract from the merit of your action. You did not do it for the thanks you might receive, but because it is right. It is not pessimistic to assert that all through life, we are working on this principle—not that we may receive the credit for what we do, but doing good for the good's sake. Do not be so rash as to say bitterly—"So much for ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... ordered where shall it begin? Obviously among the teachers themselves. But judging from the estimate each one puts upon himself how shall we reform a thing which is already perfect? On the other hand, if we take the pessimistic attitude that all teachers are wrong will it not be a case of the blind leading the blind, in which instance their destination is definitely determined somewhere in the New Testament. Verily the situation is difficult. Nevertheless it ...
— The Head Voice and Other Problems - Practical Talks on Singing • D. A. Clippinger
... perspective of English literature. Meredith, with the analytical temper and the disconnected style of Browning, is for mature readers, not for young people. Hardy has decided power, but is too hopelessly pessimistic for anybody's comfort,—except in his earlier works, which have a romantic charm that brightens the obscurity ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... pessimistic; Fewer hours of labor than formerly; The mental factor growing; The bright side of old-time country life; The larger environment; Games; Inventiveness in rural life; Activity rather than passivity; Child labor; The finest life ...
— Rural Life and the Rural School • Joseph Kennedy
... the existing organisations in order to build up a more perfect habitation of God through the Spirit? I do not wish to exaggerate. God knows there is no need for exaggerating. The plain, unvarnished story, without any pessimistic picking out of the black bits and forgetting ail the light ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... be thought that we are excessively pessimistic in pointing rather to the dangers which the Treaty places on the tapis than to the good sense of those who will deal with them. We do not say that the Italians would have permitted their Government to solve the Adriatic question in a safer and more philosophic manner; ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... situation. And as a rule they do fail. The duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the Utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded. Tolstoi's pacificism is the only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world's values, and makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... magnetic persons usually are. He is cold, hard, and selfish. His quarrels are numerous, with the campaign managers of the Armageddon fight, with his own campaign manager of 1920, with the newspaper correspondents. He is habitually pessimistic, and pessimism and ...
— The Mirrors of Washington • Anonymous
... out, but he continued to sit at the little table, reveling in the happiness of a man who feels that he has been called to some purpose worth while. His companion hesitated to interrupt his thoughts; her somewhat drab business experience made her pessimistic toward all idealism, and yet she felt that here, surely, was a man who could carry almost any project through to success. The unique quality in him, which distinguished him from any other man she had ever known, was ...
— Dennison Grant - A Novel of To-day • Robert Stead
... made and sustained by the influence of Mr. Tilden, to place this country in the list of mail-clad warrior nations, and it is rather a fascinating proposition to those who entertain pessimistic ideas of man, and believe that all nations are ready to slay and rob when ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, May 1887 - Volume 1, Number 4 • Various
... "Don't be pessimistic," retorted the Minor Poet, "pessimism is going out. You call such changes fashions, I call them the footprints of progress. Each phase of thought is an advance upon the former, bringing the footsteps of the many nearer to the landmarks left by the ...
— Sketches in Lavender, Blue and Green • Jerome K. Jerome
... genius. They were so truly new or different in their point of view, so very clear, incisive, brief, with so much point in them (The Second Motive; The Right Man). For by then having been struggling with the short-story problem in other magazine offices before this, I had become not a little pessimistic as to the trend of American short fiction, as well as long—the impossibility of finding any, even supposing it publishable once we had it. My own experience with "Sister Carrie" as well as the fierce opposition or chilling indifference ...
— Twelve Men • Theodore Dreiser
... Champlain, to New York and give a demonstration of the aeroplane over the city. New machines had come from England, hope sprang eternal in the reporting breast, and events of staggering scientific import were foreshadowed. Other experts were pessimistic. They claimed their own apparatus was better than D'Aubigne's and so got a little advertisement for themselves. Other experts again blamed the administration in a vague way. An eminent actress was interviewed and spoke of her new telephone play without adding much to the national stock of wisdom. ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... refinement, one which prevents them from enjoying the raw jests of the Sketches by Boz, but leaves them easily open to that slight but poisonous sentimentalism which I note amid all the merits of David Copperfield. In the same way I shall speak of Little Dorrit, with reference to a school of pessimistic fiction which did not exist when it was written, of Hard Times in the light of the most modern crises of economics, and of The Child's History of England in the light of the most matured authority of ...
— Appreciations and Criticisms of the Works of Charles Dickens • G. K. Chesterton
... Only the most intellectual of men have any right to beauty, to the beautiful; only in them can goodness escape being weakness. Pulchrum est paucorum hominum:[30] goodness is a privilege. Nothing could be more unbecoming to them than uncouth manners or a pessimistic look, or an eye that sees ugliness—or indignation against the general aspect of things. Indignation is the privilege of the Chandala; so is pessimism. "The world is perfect"—so prompts the instinct of the intellectual, the instinct of the man who says yes to life. ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... course of action and ultimately launched me upon the great adventure which, while leading me into many strange and terrible perils, was so profoundly to influence the whole of my after life. I remember that I was in a very pessimistic, downcast mood that night, and expressed the opinion that there appeared to be nothing for it but for me to erect a sort of glorified Kafir hut on my land, invest my money in a small flock of sheep, shepherd them myself, and so gradually build up ...
— Through Veld and Forest - An African Story • Harry Collingwood
... and worried this morning, Lord Donal, and so you take a pessimistic view of life. ...
— Jennie Baxter, Journalist • Robert Barr
... obscure, dim, shaded, lowering, overcast, lurid; melancholy, dejected, sad, despondent, pessimistic, disheartened, morose, crestfallen, ...
— Putnam's Word Book • Louis A. Flemming
... Within half a mile of the walls Weary refused to go farther, and after wasting some time in vain efforts to urge him on we had to camp where we were, having only done 101/2 miles. This was very sad, but I took hope from the fact that Titus, who is usually pretty pessimistic, had not yet given up hopes of getting him back alive. He had an extra whack of oats at the expense of the other ponies, and my big beast made up for his shortage by hauling the sledge towards him with his tethered leg, and forcing his nose into our precious biscuit tank, out of which he helped ...
— The Worst Journey in the World, Volumes 1 and 2 - Antarctic 1910-1913 • Apsley Cherry-Garrard
... talk," he acknowledged. "That's what I need now and then. Perhaps I get a pessimistic view when I'm trying for an ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... compel to surrender all that it can offer us, which the artist must bend and shape to his own creative purposes. It has been said that d'Annunzio had a philosophy and Nietzsche and Tolstoy were invoked as influences, but there is as little of Tolstoy's moralizing in "The Intruder" as of Nietzsche's pessimistic idealism in "The Child of Pleasure" or "The Triumph of Death." Whatever conclusions may be drawn from the problem of the Eternal Feminine as postulated in all his novels—and that is the only problem which he confronts—it is hardly to be dignified ...
— The Child of Pleasure • Gabriele D'Annunzio
... writing it. That evening he and Amy dropped in at Number 14 Hensey and found a roomful of fellows in excited discussion of the game. There was a disposition on the part of some of the fellows to consider the Claflin contest as good as won, but Jack Innes was more pessimistic. ...
— Left Tackle Thayer • Ralph Henry Barbour
... was a most memorable talk because it opened out quite new horizons of thought. I'd been working rather close and out of touch with Ewart's free gesticulating way. He was pessimistic that day and sceptical to the very root of things. He made me feel clearly, what I had not felt at all before, the general adventurousness of life, particularly of life at the stage we had reached, and also the absence of definite ...
— Tono Bungay • H. G. Wells
... behind a low wall that extended around the small circular park in the centre of the square, and behind any odd shelter they could find. The car lay in the line of fire but had not been struck. We were sufficiently pessimistic to be convinced that it would go up in smoke before the row was over, and took a good look at our shoes to see whether they would last through ...
— A Journal From Our Legation in Belgium • Hugh Gibson
... of the peculiar doubt that was as characteristic of her as the quick changes of her eyes. It gives just that pessimistic touch that tempered her valiant adventurousness, that gave a color at last to the ...
— The Passionate Friends • Herbert George Wells
... neither Scotists nor Thomists, neither adherents nor detractors, suspected that a heretical Jew was slumbering under the name Avicebron. It remained for an inquirer of our own day, Solomon Munk, to reveal the face of Gabirol under the mask of a garbled name. Amazed, we behold that the pessimistic philosopher of to-day can as little as the schoolmen of the middle ages shake himself free from the despised Jew. Schopenhauer may object as he will, it is certain that Gabirol was his predecessor by more ...
— Jewish Literature and Other Essays • Gustav Karpeles
... closely related peasant stock of Austria has found hardly at any other hands than those of the Tirolese Karl Schoenherr an equally unadorned depiction. Rosegger's Styrian peasants are, in spite of the pessimistic Sylvan Schoolmaster, drawn after all with much more extenuating gentleness. More recent literary products of Styrian writers are, however, no whit inferior in local patriotism to the works of the still living first master. The warmest praise of his home land has been ...
— The German Classics of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries - Masterpieces of German Literature Vol. 19 • Various
... suppose them to have been eminently successful in turning children away from the faith she sought to encourage. For this "Keepsake" the same lady let her poetical fancy take flight in "The Remembrance of Youth is a Sigh," a somewhat lugubrious and pessimistic subject for a child's Christmas Annual. Occasionally a more cheerful mood possessed "Ianthe," as she chose to call herself, and then we have some of the earliest descriptions of country life in literature for American children. There is one especially charming picture of a walk in ...
— Forgotten Books of the American Nursery - A History of the Development of the American Story-Book • Rosalie V. Halsey
... day by day—honest, loyal, and simple-hearted as they were, contented with their lot, and receiving all things so unquestioningly and thankfully, filled my life, and brought a great calm to a mind that had, hitherto, been somewhat self-centred and troubled by pessimistic doubts and fantastic dreams ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... seem to be very hopeful. On the whole, the ring of the book is rather pessimistic. Yet he mentions intellectual possibilities as well as impossibilities, bright prospects for religious developments as well as an unfavorable religious outlook, social and economic prospects favorable and unfavorable, and finally the hope that relations between the races ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... with an explanation which does not explain. Turgenef, the artist, the poet, the creator, does not know, they say, how to dispose of his heroes at the end of his stories, and he therefore kills them off. The truth, however, is that the sceptic, pessimistic Turgenef could not as an artist faithful to his belief do aught else with his heroes than to let them perish. For to him cruel fate, merciless destiny, was not mere figure of speech, but reality of realities. To Turgenef, life was at bottom a tragedy; ...
— Lectures on Russian Literature - Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenef, Tolstoy • Ivan Panin
... Let our enemies laugh at our pretensions to penetrate the world-mysteries of Aryavarta," as a certain critic recently expressed himself. However pessimistic may be our critics' views, yet, even in the event of our conclusions not proving more trustworthy than those of Fergusson, Wilson, Wheeler, and the rest of the archeologists and Sanskritists who have written about India, still, I hope, they will not be less susceptible of proof. ...
— From the Caves and Jungles of Hindostan • Helena Pretrovna Blavatsky
... breakfast, Kit sat down under the tarpaulin and ate a second breakfast thrice as hearty. The heavy, purging toil of weeks had given him the stomach and appetite of a wolf. He could eat anything, in any quantity, and be unaware that he possessed a digestion. Shorty he found voluble and pessimistic, and from him he received surprising tips concerning their bosses and ominous forecasts of the expedition. Thomas Stanley Sprague was a budding mining engineer and the son of a millionaire. Doctor Adolph Stine was also the son of a wealthy ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... colonel's course. There were others, good men and patriotic, men who would have died for liberty, in the abstract, men who sought to walk uprightly, and to live peaceably with all, but who, by much brooding over the conditions surrounding their life, had grown hopelessly pessimistic concerning ...
— The Colonel's Dream • Charles W. Chesnutt
... good many people of pessimistic disposition say much about greed in American life. One would think to hear them talk that we were a race of misers in this country. To lay too much stress upon the reports of greed in the newspapers would be folly, since their function is to report the unusual and even ...
— Random Reminiscences of Men and Events • John D. Rockefeller
... feast,' which shows that if we are truly happy, everything about us will appear brighter and more delightful. Again, it says: 'A merry heart doeth good like a medicine.' How true this is; you never saw a sour, gloomy pessimistic person who was in real good health, while the one who shows the most gladsome face is either in splendid physical condition or else has risen above his pains and distress in his appreciation of God's blessings. They are always believing that 'it ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... kept the record of public opinion, and from time to time have invoked the aid of psychometry, which has dissipated every fear and contradicted all the pessimistic notions of politicians and newspaper correspondents down to the ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... lose one and enable him to get on level terms again. When two players with plus handicaps are engaged in a match, a bunkered ball will generally mean a lost hole, but others who have not climbed to this pinnacle of excellence are far too pessimistic if they assume that this rule operates in their case also. The second matter in which the philosophic golfer rises superior to his less favoured brother when there is a bunker stroke to be played, is that he fully realises ...
— The Complete Golfer [1905] • Harry Vardon
... value of their assistance. The German drive of the 27th of May, beginning on the Chemin des Dames, had pushed south to the Marne and westward towards Meaux. The French falling back in haste had maintained their lines intact, but were pessimistic as to the possibility of stopping the enemy advance. On the 31st of May, German vanguard units entered Chateau-Thierry, crossed the river, and planned to secure the bridges. At this moment American machine gunners of ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... approaching doom," he writes, kept him from sleep, his fears being equal to his hopes. He was especially sensitive and discouraged by unforeseen expenditure, while his sanguine partner, Roebuck, on the contrary, continued hopeful and energetic, and often rallied his pessimistic partner on his propensity to look upon the dark side. He was one of those who adhered to the axiom, "Never bid the devil good-morning till you meet him." Smiles believes that it is probable that without Roebuck's support Watt ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... of the "Love of Zion" movement and eventually of Zionism and Territorialism. The theory expounded in Pinsker's pamphlet made a strong appeal to the Russian Jews, not only on account of its close reasoning but also because it gave powerful utterance to that pessimistic frame of mind which seemed to have seized upon them all. Its weakest point lay in the fact that it rested on a wrong historic premise and on a narrow definition of the term "nation" in the sense of a territorial and political organism. Pinaker seems to have overlooked that the Jews ...
— History of the Jews in Russia and Poland. Volume II • S.M. Dubnow
... under certain circumstances became prejudice. He could never, in any case, be made to run a machine. He hated the obvious way of saying or doing a thing. He cultivated the "unexpected" almost to a fault, and always gave a touch of originality even to the commonplace. His pessimistic and unhopeful temperament was doubtless due to inherent and hereditary bodily weakness, and to the lack of muscular cultivation in his youth, which might have modified inherent tendencies. His mental lack was form not force; and ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... had predicted hymns in the drawing-room, he had been too sanguine (or too pessimistic). Of Ada, when they arrived, there were no signs. It seemed that she had gone straight to bed. Young Mr Richards was sitting on the sofa, moodily turning the leaves of a photograph album, which contained portraits of Master Edward Waller in geometrically progressing ...
— Psmith in the City • P. G. Wodehouse
... oppressive to sinners and prophets. He concluded he was the former, and sighed restlessly, looking out across the fields, where, deep in the stalks of the wheat, blood-red poppies opened like raw wounds. At other times he had compared them to little fairy camp-fires; but his mood was pessimistic, and he saw, in the furrows that the plough had raised, the scars on the breast of a tortured earth; and he read sermons in bundles of fresh-cut fagots; and death was written where a sickle lay beside a pile of grass, crisping to hay in the splendid ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... But if the pessimistic mood may thus find support in watching the waves of the sea, so no less surely can the hopeful and joyous mood be evolved and stimulated by the same influence. Before Sophocles came AEschylus. The greatest hero of this earlier poet was Prometheus, ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... Oxford. He had left it forty years ago under a cloud. He came back in a dignified character with an assured position. He liked the familiar buildings and the society of scholars. The young men interested and amused him. Ironical as he might be at times, and pessimistic, his talk was intellectually stimulating. His strong convictions, even his inveterate prejudices, prevented his irony from degenerating into cynicism. History, said Carlyle, is the quintessence of innumerable biographies, and it ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... Dad—Will's been having a hard time, and it's made him pessimistic. He's written a play, and he was ruining it with an unhappy ending. But now—oh, now it has a happy ending! It'll be a success! (Rushes to Will.) Oh, Will, I see just how it goes! I've got the very words! Let ...
— The Pot Boiler • Upton Sinclair
... chronological order of the dramas, have long since displayed the facts that Shakespeare's earlier original plays were largely comedies of a joyous nature, and that, as the years pass, his work becomes more serious and philosophical; in time developing into the pessimistic bitterness of Lear and Timon of Athens, but softening and lightening, at the end of his career, in the gravely reflective but kindly mood of Cymbeline, A Winter's Tale, and The Tempest; yet no serious attempt has ever been made to trace and demonstrate in the personal contact of the ...
— Shakespeare's Lost Years in London, 1586-1592 • Arthur Acheson
... has its effect. There is need of such teaching, and it can be appropriated into the thought and life of the time with great promise of good. Yet the outcome of George Eliot's morality was rather depressing than otherwise. While she was no pessimist, yet she made her readers feel that life was pessimistic in its main tendencies. She makes on the minds of very many of her readers the impression that life has not very much light in it. This comes from the whole cast of her mind, and still more because the light of true ideal hopes was absent from her thought. A ...
— George Eliot; A Critical Study of Her Life, Writings & Philosophy • George Willis Cooke
... playfully tender in its irony, but later, under the influence of his critical antagonism to Brunetiere, growing keener, stronger, and more bitter. In 'Thais' he has undertaken to show the bond of sympathy that unites the pessimistic sceptic to the Christian ascetic, since both despise the world. In 'Lys Rouge', his greatest novel, he traces the perilously narrow line that separates love from hate; in 'Opinions de M. l'Abbe Jerome Coignard' he has given us the ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... his gig, to confer with Hilton as to the newly beefed-up fleet. Instead of being glum and pessimistic and foreboding, he was chipper and enthusiastic. They had rebuilt a thousand Oman ships. By combining Oman and Terran science, and adding everything the First Team had been able to reduce to practise, they had hyped up the power by a good fifteen per cent. Seven hundred of those ships, ...
— Masters of Space • Edward Elmer Smith
... in Mr. JOHN MURRAY'S pessimistic forecast is his failure to recognise and advocate the only and obvious remedy. By the reduction of the Bread Subsidy fifty millions have been made available for the relief of national needs. We do not say that this would be enough, but if carefully laid out in grants to deserving ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 158, May 12, 1920 • Various
... no means of a deep-seated malady, she decided that she was in love with Gregoire. But the admission embraced the understanding with herself, that nothing could come of it. She accepted it as a phase of that relentless fate which in pessimistic moments she was inclined to ...
— At Fault • Kate Chopin
... the indiscriminate reading of vice investigations is dangerous for many young people,—for young men because some of them are allured into personal investigations, and for young women because they get an exaggerated and pessimistic view of all sexual problems. For the intelligent reader who wants the general information that every public-spirited citizen should have, the well-known book by Jane Addams will serve both as an outline and an encyclopedia of the social evil. Social ...
— Sex-education - A series of lectures concerning knowledge of sex in its - relation to human life • Maurice Alpheus Bigelow
... unduly pessimistic? I fear that this is the case with most men who, like Dante, have crossed their fiftieth year and find themselves in ...
— The Constitution of the United States - A Brief Study of the Genesis, Formulation and Political Philosophy of the Constitution • James M. Beck
... thought that you have behaved like a gentleman, and that any discourtesy of hers cannot detract from the merit of your action. You did not do it for the thanks you might receive, but because it is right. It is not pessimistic to assert that all through life, we are working on this principle—not that we may receive the credit for what we do, but doing good for the good's sake. Do not be so rash as to say bitterly—"So much for sacrificing my own comfort!" "Catch me ...
— The Secret of a Happy Home (1896) • Marion Harland
... enthusiasm; an enthusiasm for the Catholic creed which made mediaeval civilisation. Even on the huge Puritan plains of the Middle West the influence strays in the strangest fashion. And it is notable that among the pessimistic epitaphs of the Spoon River Anthology, in that churchyard compared with which most churchyards are cheery, among the suicides and secret drinkers and monomaniacs and hideous hypocrites of that happy village, almost the only record ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... him; he came to us. He dined with us last night—he and Walter—and his manner was gloomy in the extreme. After dinner Walter took him apart with me and asked him what he really thought of the case. He was most pessimistic. 'My dear sir,' he said, 'the only advice I can give you is that you prepare yourself to contemplate disaster as philosophically as you can. In my opinion your cousin is almost certain to be convicted.' 'But,' said Walter, 'what ...
— The Red Thumb Mark • R. Austin Freeman
... without fear, as though upheld by some overwhelming power or carried in the hollow of some superhuman hand. The captain, a sad-eyed, strong-featured American, was cartooned in the papers as "Gloomy Gus" (the pessimistic hero ...
— Revolution and Other Essays • Jack London
... them. It is strange how sympathetic books drift to the hand of a reader possessed with a consuming idea; how they gather around him, fall open to his eye, and give up the thing he yearns to feed on. Without the knowledge necessary to selection, Jim had an affinity for books of pessimistic doctrine, and though both means and opportunities were limited, he gathered together, in the course of two years, quite a library of precious volumes, and he came forth from these an intellectual giant ...
— In the Roaring Fifties • Edward Dyson
... had raised its rates to Southern points. One might have sensed that shadow which hangs always over commercial California in the sombreness which froze the group at this news. From five minutes of pessimistic discussion, Goodyear led them by a scattered fire of personalities. Billy Darnton was going to give a bull's head breakfast at San Jacinto. Al Hemphill was coming to it all the way from New York. Charlie Bates had pulled out for the new gold diggings in the Mojave ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... the reasons for such a sequence, it would appear that the purpose must be to deprive the student of any occasion for becoming pessimistic. Certainly nobody will ever have his convictions upset by looking at ancient cloths daubed over with linseed oil, nor by the bum-ta-ra of music. But, to my mind, in a country like Spain, it is better that our young men should be dissatisfied than that they should go to the laboratory every day in ...
— Youth and Egolatry • Pio Baroja
... go to Japan. He was staring worshippingly at Claire. With rapturous gaze he noted the grey glory of her eyes, the delicate curve of her cheek, the grace of her neck. He had no time to listen to pessimistic warnings from any Gloomy Gus of a Subconscious Self. He was ashamed that he had ever even for a moment allowed himself to be persuaded that Claire was not all that was perfect. No more doubts and hesitations for Dudley Pickering. He ...
— Uneasy Money • P.G. Wodehouse
... emotions, and yet, it has as great influence on invention as any other emotion. Do we not know that melancholy and even profound sorrow has furnished poets, musicians, painters, and sculptors with their most beautiful inspirations? Is there not an art frankly and deliberately pessimistic? And this influence is not at all limited to esthetic creation. Dare we hold that hypochondria and insanity following upon the delirium of persecution are devoid of imagination? Their morbid character is, on the contrary, the well ...
— Essay on the Creative Imagination • Th. Ribot
... uneasiness. He was thinking gloomily that it would be just his luck to meet Mrs. Bartlett unexpectedly in the streets of Fort Erie on one of those rare occasions when he was enjoying the pleasures of sin for a season. He had the most pessimistic forebodings of what the future might have in store for him. Sometimes, when neighbors or customers "treated" him in the village, and he felt he had taken all the whisky that cloves would conceal, he took a five-cent ...
— In the Midst of Alarms • Robert Barr
... question of the child's age when that "little agitation in the brain called thought," begins. There were two remarkable cases given; one, the child who climbed upon my knee to amaze and upset me by her pessimistic remarks about life; the second, my little friend Nesta— that was her name and she is still on my visiting list—who revealed her callow mind striving to grasp an abstract idea—the idea of time apart from some visible or tangible object. Now ...
— A Traveller in Little Things • W. H. Hudson
... the public would listen to him, I urged him to bring out a volume of selected pieces from all his works, an idea which for some time he contested with his usual pessimistic vigour. Having, however, set my heart upon it, I spoke upon the subject to Mr. John Lane, who at once saw his way to bring out such a volume at his own risk. To the poet’s astonishment the book was a success, and it at once passed into a second edition. In ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... in a voice rendered husky by much shouting in dirty weather that the fog-banks would be drifting in from the sea before nightfall. And now he had that mournful satisfaction which is the special privilege of the pessimistic. These fog-banks, the pest of the east coast, are the materials that form the light fleecy clouds which drift westward in sunny weather like a gauze veil across the face of the sky. They roll across the North Sea from their home in the marshes of Holland on the face ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... characters find a more congenial soil to grow in than in Protestantism, whose fashions of feeling have been set by minds of a decidedly pessimistic order. But even in Protestantism they have been abundant enough; and in its recent "liberal" developments of Unitarianism and latitudinarianism generally, minds of this order have played and still are playing leading and constructive parts. Emerson himself is an admirable example. ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... goal of the soul, has been much misunderstood, and much error has crept into the teaching even among some very worthy teachers. To conceive of Nirvana as a state of extinction of consciousness would be to fall into the error of the pessimistic school of philosophy which thinks of life and consciousness as a curse, and regards the return into a total unconsciousness as the thing to be most desired. The true teaching is that Nirvana is a state of the fullest consciousness—a state in which the soul is relieved of all the illusion ...
— A Series of Lessons in Gnani Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... call names, John Mayrant—but never mind! I could lament you sick if I chose to go on about our corporations and corruption that I see with my pessimistic eye; but the other eye sees the American man himself—the type that our eighty millions on the whole melt into and to which my heart warms each time I land again from more polished and colder shores—my optimistic ...
— Lady Baltimore • Owen Wister
... comes out like stories very much," responded the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately thought, had read less than half a dozen books in his long and ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... preparation for the analysis of desire. In animals we are not troubled by the disturbing influence of ethical considerations. In dealing with human beings, we are perpetually distracted by being told that such-and-such a view is gloomy or cynical or pessimistic: ages of human conceit have built up such a vast myth as to our wisdom and virtue that any intrusion of the mere scientific desire to know the facts is instantly resented by those who cling to comfortable illusions. But no one cares whether animals are virtuous ...
— The Analysis of Mind • Bertrand Russell
... on William Blake, Chesterton says that he is "personally quite convinced that if every human being lived a thousand years, every human being would end up either in utter pessimistic scepticism or in the Catholic creed." In course of time, in fact, everybody would have to decide whether they preferred to be an intellectualist or a mystic. A debauch of intellectualism, lasting perhaps nine hundred ...
— G. K. Chesterton, A Critical Study • Julius West
... the war in the spirit in which our affairs were conducted before the war is about as hopeful an enterprise as if an elderly jobbing brick-layer, working on strict trade-union rules, set out to stop the biggest avalanche that ever came down a mountain-side. And since I am by no means altogether pessimistic, in spite of my qualmy phases, it follows that I do not believe that the old spirit will necessarily prevail. I do not, because I believe that in the past few decades a new spirit has come into human affairs; that our ostensible rulers and leaders have been falling ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... dream began in the time of Keats and Shelley to creep down among the dullest professions and the most prosaic classes of society. A spirit of revolt was growing among the young of the middle classes, which had nothing at all in common with the complete and pessimistic revolt against all things in heaven or earth, which has been fashionable among the young in more recent times. The Shelleyan enthusiast was altogether on the side of existence; he thought that every cloud and clump of grass shared his strict republican orthodoxy. He represented, ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... years older, it seemed, in a moment, and the thought that came into her brain, clamoring to be heard, exultantly, insistently knocking for admission, was this—her mother's pessimistic way of looking at life was right—there were things too good to be true—she had been too sure of her happiness. The thought, like cold steel, lay against her heart and dulled its beating. But the pain in his eyes must be comforted. She stood up, and gravely ...
— Purple Springs • Nellie L. McClung
... Harrison school of Positivists. I went with her to one of Mrs. Orr's receptions, where we met Robert Browning, a fine looking gentleman of seventy years, with white hair and mustache. He is frank, easy, playful, and a good talker. Mrs. Orr seemed to be taking a very pessimistic view of our present sphere of action, which Mr. Browning, with poetic coloring, was trying to ...
— History of Woman Suffrage, Volume III (of III) • Various
... of Miss Chris. First the new overseer, knocking at her door, would call through the crack that a cow had calved, or that one of the sheep was too ill to go to pasture. Then Rindy, entering with her pails, would shake a pessimistic head. ...
— The Voice of the People • Ellen Glasgow
... regard such a view of humanity as grotesquely pessimistic; but there is no doubt that many of us do make of life little more than what the Preacher thought it. It is not only the victims of civilisation who are forced to wearisome monotony of toil which barely yields daily bread; but we see all around us men and women wearing out their lives in the race ...
— Expositions Of Holy Scripture - Volume I: St. Luke, Chaps. I to XII • Alexander Maclaren
... attached to the higher civilisation. The higher civilisation, so far, had treated them inconsiderately, at sparrow clubs. The Owl talked a good deal about the low moral tone of the human race in this respect, and was pessimistic about it, failing to perceive that higher types of organisms always like to signify their superiority over lower ones by shooting them, or otherwise making their lives a burden. The Owl, however, was a very talented bird, and one felt that even his fallacies were a mark of attainments ...
— 'That Very Mab' • May Kendall and Andrew Lang
... was too pessimistic; he was an earnest spirit, unafraid to speak his mind and too much a lover of truth to be misled by a love of his country into making exaggerated claims for works by his countrymen. We must not forget that he was here looking upon Brazilian letters as a whole; in other essays by him we discover ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... day, perhaps, if he should rise to the dignity of an English classic, this will be spoken of as his third period, and critics will be wise in the elucidation thereof. But just at present this third period is characterized by the terms 'pessimistic' ...
— The Bibliotaph - and Other People • Leon H. Vincent
... made our friend pessimistic about anarchism, at times, and inclined to join the socialist party. His life is made miserable by the ceaseless debate of his mind and soul over which of these two philosophies is the best one for the race. He, suspiciously, is always looking for another case like Nicoll's, and is doubtful ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... vigorous optimism as to Israel's ultimate well-being on earth, and the blessedness of the chosen people in the Messianic kingdom is sketched in glowing and sensuous colours (xxix., xxxix.-xl., lxiii.-lxxiv.). Over against these passages stand others of a hopelessly pessimistic character, wherein, alike as to Israel's [v.03 p.0455] present and future destiny on earth, there is written nothing save "lamentation, and mourning, and woe." The world is a scene of corruption, its evils are irremediable, its end is nigh, ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... of greasy smoke he glimpsed an active figure—the only human being in sight except himself—and he hastened to its side. It was Fay, the night-watchman, a powerful, stocky man who clearly did not share the tanner's pessimistic conviction. He had ransacked the premises for every hand fire-extinguisher he could find, had brought them to the burning buildings and, with fine optimism, was now spraying their contents on the edges ...
— The Monk of Hambleton • Armstrong Livingston
... smile, say: "Ah! c'est gai la-bas—and monsieur was well amused while in that beautiful country?" "ah!—tiens! c'est gentil ca!" they will exclaim, as you enthusiastically continue to explain. They never dull your enthusiasm by short phlegmatic or pessimistic replies. And when you are sad they will condone so genuinely with you that you forget your disappointments in the charming pleasantry of their sympathy. But all this continual race for pleasure is destined in the course of time to ...
— The Real Latin Quarter • F. Berkeley Smith
... satisfactory reply to the persons who eke out a livelihood by publishing pessimistic books, and hooting, as the great Alexandre Dumas says, at the great drama ...
— Alfred Tennyson • Andrew Lang
... hall rings with hand-clapping. The great hall begins to fill with chuckles. There it is—the same curious grin, the lugubrious apology of a grin, the weary, pessimistic ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... in England, Carlyle and Dawson were his companions on his visit to Salisbury Plain. They went to Stonehenge together and on that day Carlyle was in one of his saddest and most pessimistic moods. Life was not worth living—the whole world was rotten and wrong—and he wondered, like the old monk in Longfellow's Golden Legend, why God didn't lose his patience with it wholly and shatter it like glass. Men were fools and ...
— Recollections • David Christie Murray
... When one is being pessimistic, one almost always has the feeling of being rather clever. It is forced upon one a little, of course, having all those other people about one stodgily standing up for people and not really ...
— Crowds - A Moving-Picture of Democracy • Gerald Stanley Lee
... great steel body was plunging and heaving in the billows. It was a gloomy company about the wardroom table. Upon each and all hung an oppression of spirit. Captain Parkinson came from his cabin and went on deck. Constitutionally he was a nervous and pessimistic man with a fixed belief in the conspiracy of events, banded for the undoing of him and his. Blind or dubious conditions racked his soul, but real danger found him not only prepared, but even eager. Now his face was ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... his speculative temper, was ever returning to a pantheistic creed. The same is true of the Brownings. Arnold is, of course, undecided upon the question, and now approves, now rejects the pessimistic view of pantheism expressed in Empedocles on AEtna, in accordance with his change of mood putting the poem in and out of the various editions of his works. But wherever his poetry is most worthy, his worship of nature coincides with Wordsworth's pantheistic ...
— The Poet's Poet • Elizabeth Atkins
... upon things from a pessimistic standpoint, never find anything in them save pretexts for pouring out to their hearers tales ...
— Common Sense - - Subtitle: How To Exercise It • Yoritomo-Tashi
... within himself as to whether it would not be judicious to call in again the assistance of Link, and by telling him of the new evidence which had been found place him thereby in possession of new material to prosecute the case. But Link lately had taken so pessimistic a view of the matter that Lucian fancied he would scoff at his late discoveries, and discourage him in prosecuting what seemed ...
— The Silent House • Fergus Hume
... which the mates had accustomed them; but they were not satisfied with the new order for they could feel that this strange peace was unreal, unhealthful. Aye, the calm before the typhoon. They felt it just as I felt it, just as Nigger felt it. As for pessimistic Nigger, so strictly did he mind his own business these quiet days he was like a dumb man, a silent brown shadow. But he went on ...
— The Blood Ship • Norman Springer
... Some pessimistic wiseacre has said that all the dire and dreadful things in life drop out of a clear sky; that it is the unexpected which is to be feared, and that the unknown bridges are the ones in which dangers lurk and where calamity ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... revival of the nineteenth century that placed Ronsard on a throne again. Even to-day, however, there are pessimistic Frenchmen who doubt whether their country has ever produced a great poet. Mr. Bennet has told us of one who, on being asked who was the greatest of French poets, replied: "Victor Hugo, helas!" And in ...
— Old and New Masters • Robert Lynd
... they haven't been brought across the range," said the pessimistic Mark. "If the air everywhere is so rarified the men would die crossing the mountains." "Think of the people living on Mt. Washington—and other heights!" cried Jack, suddenly. "Why, they will be snuffed out like candles. It ...
— On a Torn-Away World • Roy Rockwood
... take a very pessimistic view of the economic position of Great Britain. Mr. Hyndman said that "Great Britain had lost her commercial and industrial supremacy. The United States now stood first, Germany second, and Great Britain was forced into third place."[799] Many years ago some far-seeing Socialists had prophesied ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... other hand, was a bitter opponent of what she called "ring rule," and Adelaide Rich, who was the only recruit that they could succeed in adding to their party, had never forgotten the depths of iniquity which her pessimistic acquaintance had revealed in the seemingly innocent and well conducted first meeting, and was prepared to distrust everything, down to the reading of ...
— Betty Wales Freshman • Edith K. Dunton
... whether we are or not," returned the pessimistic youth. "Wait till there's only one piece o' pie left at dinner some day. You'll have ter have it. Marm'll say so. But if you was a boy—an' I could lick ye—ye wouldn't dare ...
— Janice Day at Poketown • Helen Beecher Long
... there is no greater authority on the pathology of equatorial regions, began his remarks with the confession that in former years, under the influence of early training, he shared in the pessimistic opinions then current about tropical colonization by the white races. In recent years, however, his views on this subject had undergone a complete revolution—a revolution that began with the establishment of the germ ...
— Campaigning in Cuba • George Kennan
... ever do," muttered pessimistic Tom. "But here comes our relief," he continued, as the light of a lantern hanging on the arm of the foremost man revealed a group coming toward them. "High time, too! I got drenched to the skin while I was lying on the ground ...
— Army Boys on German Soil • Homer Randall
... 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 ...
— Initiation into Literature • Emile Faguet
... paralysis of Japanese civilization, which, like oft-tapped maple-trees, began to die at the top. This was in accordance with its theories and its literature. In the Bible there is, possibly, one book which is pessimistic in tone, Ecclesiastes. In the bulky and dropsical canon of Buddhism there is a whole library ...
— The Religions of Japan - From the Dawn of History to the Era of Meiji • William Elliot Griffis
... brow-beating suavely the uppish representative of some foreign State. No man could then rival him in the insolently aristocratic school of diplomacy which England has made her own. But in his most dangerous crisis he had never been restless, apprehensive, pessimistic, as he was at this moment. And after all it was a very simple matter that had brought him there. It was merely the question of meeting a man as if by accident, and then afterwards making that man do certain things ...
— With Edged Tools • Henry Seton Merriman
... analysis, our appreciation of America will depend on whether we are optimistic or pessimistic in regard to the great social problem which is formed of so many smaller problems. If we think that the best we can do is to preserve what we have, America will be but a series of disappointments. If, however, we believe that man's sympathies for ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... his chair and went upstairs to his own room. The impression made upon him by Maria Addolorata, when she had bitten her hand, had been a strong one, but the man's nature, though not exactly distrustful, was melancholic and pessimistic. Two hours and more had passed since they had been together, and things had a different look. He realized more clearly the strength of the ties which bound Maria to her convent life, and the effort it must be to her to break them. He remembered the ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... This pessimistic view of the world is illustrated by the figure of a king, who, in the midst of ruins, places his foot upon the prostrate form of a chained victim; Happiness, with bandaged eyes, scatters treasures ...
— Women in the fine arts, from the Seventh Century B.C. to the Twentieth Century A.D. • Clara Erskine Clement
... I known Raffles in so pessimistic a mood. I did not share his sombre view of either matter, though I confined my remarks to the one that seemed to weigh most heavily on ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... of life will qualify a man for admission to the Land of the Joyful Heart. One must have overflowingness of life. In his book "The Science of Happiness" Jean Finot declares, that the "disenchantment and the sadness which degenerate into a sort of pessimistic melancholy are frequently due to the diminution of the vital energy. And as pain and sorrow mark the diminution, the joy of living and the upspringing of happiness signify the increase of energy.... By using special ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... but the officer, being certain that he is either a mangled corpse among the mules, or far more probably triumphantly asleep on a stack of tibbin, declines to search for him, and the party steps out for home, are challenged by a pessimistic sentry, dismissed, and, stumbling over their recumbent comrades, find an unoccupied corner of their tents, and sleep the sleep of the just ...
— The Fifth Battalion Highland Light Infantry in the War 1914-1918 • F.L. Morrison
... distinction, some may be heard privately to confess that "the game is not worth the candle;" and when they hear of others who wish to tread in their steps, shake their heads and say—"If they only knew!" Without accepting in full so pessimistic an estimate of success, we must still say that very generally the cost of the candle deducts largely from the gain of the game. That which in these exceptional cases holds among ourselves, holds more generally in America. ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... loaves and the fishes, and the shielding of the real offender, would suffer an innocent man to go to the social gallows for lack of the word which would have cleared him. He laughed rather bitterly and added, out of the heart of the under-thought: "I'm glad I'm not naturally inclined to be pessimistic." ...
— The Quickening • Francis Lynde
... chiffon belts, you mean, not costumes, if we go by Corbett's clothes ideas," growled the pessimistic, prospective producer of the possible next season's hit in the ...
— Blue-grass and Broadway • Maria Thompson Daviess
... 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 we must ...
— History Of Modern Philosophy - From Nicolas of Cusa to the Present Time • Richard Falckenberg
... with whom the author has enjoyed much conference persists in taking a most discouraging and pessimistic view of this mele. It is gratifying to be able to differ from him in this matter and to be able to sustain one's position by the consenting opinion of other Hawaiians equally accomplished as the learned friend ...
— Unwritten Literature of Hawaii - The Sacred Songs of the Hula • Nathaniel Bright Emerson
... man let his most pessimistic thoughts drag his spirits down. Gloom is contagious, and it soon became as heavy in the room as the gray clouds of smoke. The one bright, hopeful spot was the lone woman prisoner. She alone refused to succumb to the depressing atmosphere, and sought to play woman's ancient role of ...
— In the Claws of the German Eagle • Albert Rhys Williams
... the German Fleet has come out at last. The Quartermaster-Sergeant, when he meets the ration parties behind the lines that night, announces to a platoon Sergeant that we have won a great naval victory. The platoon Sergeant, who is suffering from trench feet and is a constant reader of a certain pessimistic halfpenny journal, replies gloomily: "We'll have had heavy losses oorselves, too, I doot!" This observation is overheard by various members of the ration party. By midnight several hundred yards of the firing-line know for a fact that there has been a naval disaster of the first magnitude ...
— All In It K(1) Carries On - A Continuation of the First Hundred Thousand • John Hay Beith (AKA: Ian Hay)
... As to being pessimistic about the future, I think our mistake was to underestimate Germany's striking force. You must always keep the German calculations in mind as well as our hopes, and you will see that the former have been falsified quite as much as the latter—in fact much more. They calculated—and not without ...
— Letters from Mesopotamia • Robert Palmer
... every sacrifice—marriage, ambition, happiness, all must be abandoned: abandoned while I live, not after I have made myself, by years of self-discipline, indifferent to such considerations.... But for its piety, the Imitation is, I think, the most pessimistic book in the world. The Exercises of St. Ignatius (perhaps because he was a saint) produce quite an opposite effect upon me; they exhort us to hope, action, courage. They make one a citizen of both worlds. Merely to read him is a campaign in the open air against a worthy ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... dark or pessimistic words spoken at St. Saviour's by Jean Jacques; and they were said to the Clerk of the Court, who could not deny the truth of them; but he wrung the hand of Jean Jacques nevertheless, and would not leave him night or day. M. Fille was like a little cruiser ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... duties, penalties, and sanctions pictured in the Utopias they paint are all too weak and tame to touch the military-minded. Tolstoi's pacificism is the only exception to this rule, for it is profoundly pessimistic as regards all this world's values, and makes the fear of the Lord furnish the moral spur provided elsewhere by the fear of the enemy. But our socialistic peace-advocates all believe absolutely in this world's values; and instead of the fear ...
— Memories and Studies • William James
... deliberate opinion of seventy-three missionaries that, as a matter of personal experience, sixty-seven cases have wrought only evil, while only fifty-three have been productive of good. The balance is on the wrong side. We must decide, in view of these replies, that there exists in general rather a pessimistic opinion as to the advantages of applying to the yamen in behalf ...
— An Inevitable Awakening • ARTHUR JUDSON BROWN
... they had come down the Yukon, bound for Circle City. But at Sixty Mile they had learned of the strike, and stopped off to look over the ground. They had just returned to their boat when Daylight landed his flour, and their report was pessimistic. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... never, for all their efforts, could enter the labyrinth as stark souls; there were on the other hand sword-like pioneering personalities, Samuel Butler, Renan, Voltaire, who progressed much slower, yet eventually much further, not in the direct pessimistic line of speculative philosophy but concerned in the eternal attempt to attach ...
— This Side of Paradise • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... feed entirely on raw meat. Indeed, for lurid and somewhat pessimistic narrative, there is nothing like the ordinary currant bun, eaten new and in quantity. A light humorous style is best attained by soda-water and dry biscuits, following cafe-noir. The soda-water may be either Scotch or Irish as the taste inclines. For a florid, tawdry style ...
— Certain Personal Matters • H. G. Wells
... supposed to have been written by David, the son of Jesse, called the sweet psalmist of Israel. He had a taste for the arts, a real genius for poetry and song. Many of the poems are beautiful in sentiment and celebrated as specimens of literature, as are some passages in Job; but the general tone is pessimistic. David's old age was full of repinings over the follies of his youth and of his middle age. The declining years of a well-spent life should be the most peaceful and happy. Then the lessons of experience are understood, and one knows how to ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... voluminous works, his glorious eulogies of Luther, Knox and Cromwell, his vivid histories, his pessimistic utterances, his hatred of falsehood and his true, pure and laborious life, I have no time or space to write. He was the last of the giants in one department of British literature. He will outlive many an author who slumbers in the great ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... pluck, this dogged resolution of no surrender. Not that they felt conscious of any particular heroism; the thought of capitulation as a means of escape from discomfort suggested itself to nobody. In moments of mental depression it might have crossed an ultra-pessimistic mind and been brooded over as a consummation that no Spartan bravery could enable us to avert. But to the masses the notion was unthinkable; the idea of surrender would not bear discussion; it was never discussed. Against Martial Law as such we did not so much complain; it was an evil, but to some ...
— The Siege of Kimberley • T. Phelan
... in the Frenchies," the pessimistic McAndrew put in, "wi' five thousand redskins aboot, and they lying in wait. The Colonel's no vera mindful of ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... for good, in spite of the obvious unpopularity which an incessant critic cannot fail to draw down upon himself. The most pessimistic of us secretly crave a little respite when for half an hour we may forget the circumambient and all-pervading gloom: music, or an entertaining book, or a dear friend lifts the burden from us. And then comes our uncompromising pessimist and chides us for our softness and for ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... Gissing is at heart, in his bones as the vulgar say, a thorough moralist and sentimentalist, an honest, true-born, downright ineradicable Englishman. Intellectually his own life was, and continued to the last to be, romantic to an extent that few lives are. Pessimistic he may at times appear, but this is almost entirely on the surface. For he was never in the least blase or ennuye. He had the pathetic treasure of the humble and downcast and unkindly entreated—unquenchable hope. He ...
— The House of Cobwebs and Other Stories • George Gissing
... the prospects in oil?" Judson's tone was pessimistic. "Not a thing doin', Gorry. Awful slow bunch, that lump of nuts I'm in with on this. Mentioned your name to one or two of 'em; but no enterprise. Boneheads that wouldn't know a white man from a crane." That he understood what Gorry understood became ...
— The Dust Flower • Basil King
... during the past 40 years, it was reserved for my old age to discover within me the power of poetical expression. I had rhymed in my youth and translated French verse, but until I wrote my one sonnet, poetry had been an untried field. The one-sided pessimistic pictures that Australian poets and writers present are false in the impression they make on the outside world and on ourselves. They lead us to forget the beauty and the brightness of the world we live in. What we ...
— An Autobiography • Catherine Helen Spence
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