"Optimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... feuds, and double-barrelled shot guns played prominent parts. Commonwealths, like communities, are advertised most widely by the evils in their midst; a fact which jolts the reformer and drives the optimist to drink. The lordly manner of living, the immense estates, and the magnificent hospitality of our hosts, was a revelation to me; and an occasional reference by one of the older servants to the grandeur of antebellum days ...
— The Statesmen Snowbound • Robert Fitzgerald
... optimist, all right," grumbled Tom. "You'd see a silver lining to any little old cloud. You remind me of the fellow that fell from the top of a skyscraper, shouting as he passed the second-story window: 'I'm all right, so far.' We may be 'all right so far,' but the ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... already settled in Missouri and had written back glowing accounts; though perhaps not more glowing than those which had come from another relative, John Quarles, brother-in-law to Mrs. Clemens, a jovial, whole-hearted optimist, well-loved by all who ...
— The Boys' Life of Mark Twain • Albert Bigelow Paine
... He's a combination of optimist and fatalist, I judge. He thinks nothing matters much, for everything is coming out all right in ...
— A Hoosier Chronicle • Meredith Nicholson
... intellectual; he looked at men with critical eyes, and was a realist and a pessimist. Dickens was emotional; he looked at men with kindled imagination, judged them by the dreams they cherished in their hearts, and was a romanticist and an optimist. Both men were humorists; but where Thackeray was delicately satirical, causing us a momentary smile, Dickens was broadly comic or farcical, winning us ...
— Outlines of English and American Literature • William J. Long
... The reinsurer, the optimist of ill-luck and disaster, slaps his pocket with satisfaction. The underwriter, who had been trying to minimize the amount of impending loss, regrets his premature pessimism. The ship has been stauncher, ...
— The Mirror of the Sea • Joseph Conrad
... no historical fragment is more suggestive than the exodus of the Jews from Egypt under Moses, who was the first great optimist, nor one which is seldomer read with an eye to the contrast which it discloses between Moses the law-giver, the idealist, the religious prophet, and the visionary; and Moses the political adventurer and the keen and unscrupulous man of the world. And yet it is here ...
— The Emancipation of Massachusetts • Brooks Adams
... a born optimist," I commented idly. "Life is one long, glorious lark to him. I believe he would be happy if he knew raw, red mutiny were going to break out ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... exhibition was received either in ominous silence or, in some quarters, with something like derision. As I have said before, there comes a time when the best-disposed debtors do not regard themselves as being repaid by promises, and when the most enthusiastic optimist desires to see something more than samples. It was only old Colon going round with his show again—flamingoes, macaws, seashells, dye-woods, gums and spices; some people laughed, and some were angry; ...
— Christopher Columbus, Complete • Filson Young
... way looks dark; far from feeling called to work among this people, I am beginning to doubt the safety of my own soul. I am afraid the desires of Bro. Brown and his family are set too much on carnal things." A dyspeptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist always keeps ...
— The Mind and Its Education • George Herbert Betts
... exclaimed, "Miserable sinner that I am!" could only be exceeded by the veracity of the assertion. Mrs Brandon only joined in the prayer-meetings that he held at our house, when Ford himself was perfectly sober—thus she did not often attend—Brandon never. Whilst he wore the top-boots, he was an optimist, and perfectly epicurean in his philosophy—I use the term in the modern sense. When he had eighty pounds odd a year, with no family of his own, no man was more jovial or happy. He had the most perfect reliance on Providence. He boasted that he belonged to the Established Church, because ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... queried Wilbur. "You're an optimist. But that's because you've never seen him ride. I consider it a good day's work to start out with him and keep within sight till night, but as for following and ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... had been a man worthy the steel of Mr. Darrow. Not that Prof. Foster was an unscrupulous optimist. He was merely an intellectual whose congenital tendencies were idealistic, just as Mr. Darrow's psychic and subconscious tendencies were anti-idealistic. And apart from this divergence of congenital tendencies Mr. Darrow and Prof. Foster had a great deal in common. ...
— A Thousand and One Afternoons in Chicago • Ben Hecht
... launched a thousand quips) now all stern in his unbattled struggle with Prohibition, dourly surveying this "land of the spree and home of the grave."... "My children," says Towne, "as they sip their light wine and beer..." He is, at least, an optimist! But then, we are reminded he is also ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... as they drove along they talked of the improvement on the farm and the profit they ought to be able to earn with the new equipment. Bob was the optimist and his uncle the pessimist in these discussions, but optimistic Bob was not without his pencil and memorandum book and usually had the better of the argument because of his uncle's disinclination to take the time to figure out the advantages and ...
— Hidden Treasure • John Thomas Simpson
... optimist, like all red-headed, freckled boys, appealed to the others, each in turn. The verdict ...
— The Hill - A Romance of Friendship • Horace Annesley Vachell
... turn to the church to make good the promise of the optimist? Let us explore the "amen corner" and see how many pious souls we shall there find whose incomes are chiefly drawn from buildings rented for immoral purposes. Even while I write I see an old white-haired man, whose power in prayer is the ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... themselves upon her, she was beginning to understand the reason for the hurt. And, guessing this, Bethune refrained from questioning, but talked gaily of books, and sunsets, and of life, and love, and the joy of living. A supreme optimist, she thought him, despite the half-veiled cynicism that threaded his somewhat fatalistic view of life, a cynicism that but added the necessary sauce piquante to ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... Derrick's face when one day he glanced through the new Mudie and Smith lists and found 'Lynwood's Heritage' no longer down. I had been trying to cheer him up about the book and quoting all the favourable remarks I had heard about it. But unluckily this was damning evidence against my optimist view. ...
— Derrick Vaughan—Novelist • Edna Lyall
... and maiden, who dashed, like so many others, into matrimony in the breathless haste of short leave, and came dangerously near repenting at leisure. Only near, of course; Mrs. BUCKROSE is too confirmed an optimist not to make it clear that the blackest boredom has a silver lining; and I had never any real fear that her nice young couple were becoming more than quite temporarily estranged. Still, things went so far that Sophia left the cottage where she and ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... cheerfulness to continue in revolt, and secondly, because pessimism appeals to the weaker side of everybody, and the pessimist, therefore, drives as roaring a trade as the publican. The person who is really in revolt is the optimist, who generally lives and dies in a desperate and suicidal effort to persuade all the other people how good they are. It has been proved a hundred times over that if you really wish to enrage people and make them angry, even unto death, the right way to do it is to tell them that they are all ...
— The Defendant • G.K. Chesterton
... long as this little girl that was a star remained a little girl, our donkey was happy. For many pretty years she would kiss his ugly muzzle and feed his mouth with sugar—and thus our donkey's thoughts sweetened day by day, till from a natural pessimist he blossomed into a perfectly absurd optimist, and dreamed the donkiest of dreams. But, one day, as he carried the girl who was really a star through the spring lanes, a young man walked beside her, and though our donkey thought very little of his talk—in fact, felt his plain "hee-haw" to be worth all its smart chirping and ...
— Prose Fancies (Second Series) • Richard Le Gallienne
... Sundays. Mr. H. T. Tuckerman makes a book of essays on various subjects, and calls it The Optimist; and then devotes several pages of preface to an argument, lexicon in hand, proving that the applicability of the term optimist is 'obvious.' An editor, at intervals of leisure, indulges his true poetic taste for the pleasure of his friends, or the entertainment of an occasional audience. Then his book appears, entitled not Miscellaneous Poems, but Asleep in the Sanctum, by A. A. Hopkins. Sometimes, not satisfied ...
— Literary Blunders • Henry B. Wheatley
... Mrs. Quiverful had so powerfully urged in the presence of the bishop's wife. As long as promotion cometh from any human source, whether north or south, east or west, will not such a claim as this hold good, in spite of all our examination tests, detur digniori's, and optimist tendencies? It is fervently to be hoped that it may. Till we can become divine, we must be content to be human, lest in our hurry for a change we ...
— Barchester Towers • Anthony Trollope
... news bulletins of his death. He died a lawyer. About Conkling as a politician I have nothing to say. There is no need to enter that field of enraged controversy. As a lawyer he was brilliant, severely logical, if he chose to be, uproarious with mirth if he thought it appropriate. He was an optimist. He was on board the "Bothnia" when she broke her shaft at sea, and much anxiety was felt for him. I sailed a week later on the "Umbria," and overtaking the "Bothnia," the two ships went into harbour ...
— T. De Witt Talmage - As I Knew Him • T. De Witt Talmage
... there is an utter absence of worry, because in truth there is nothing left to worry about, since he knows that all must be well. His higher Science makes him a confirmed optimist, for it shows him that whatever of evil there may be in any person or in any movement, it is of necessity temporary, because it is opposed to the resistless stream of evolution; whereas whatever is good in any person ...
— A Textbook of Theosophy • C.W. Leadbeater
... for opportunities to assert and reassert some favourite mental attitude, is a thing which existed comparatively little in other centuries. Solomon and Horace, Petrarch and Shakespeare were pessimists when they were melancholy, and optimists when they were happy. But the optimist of to-day seems obliged to prove that gout and unrequited love make him dance with joy, and the pessimist of to-day to prove that sunshine and a good supper convulse him with inconsolable anguish. Carlyle was strongly possessed with this mania for spiritual consistency. He wished to take the ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... restaurants which carry on the Lucretia Borgia tradition by means of one shilling and sixpenny table d'hte luncheons. The proprietor of the grocery store on the corner was bidding a silent farewell to a tomato which even he, though a dauntless optimist, had been compelled to recognize as having outlived its utility. On all these things the sun shone with a genial smile. Round the corner, in Shaftesbury Avenue, an east wind was doing its best to pierce the hardened hides of the citizenry; but it did not penetrate into Little ...
— A Damsel in Distress • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, "it's jolly good for some things. You can't ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... the most efficacious, because spontaneous and unexpected, is done by the officer and his men. The Italian officer ... with the harmony of manners which distinguishes him, obtains very easily the sympathies of this population, a sympathy, however, which for an optimist may become dangerous. Young officers must not forget that the propagators of the great Yugoslavia still exercise with their megalomania a potent influence over the primitive population and that a gesture of theirs, a word, an attitude, may even yet indirectly favour the Croat cause and make difficulties ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... up two and turn them into flounces to fuss out the others!" cried Claire, the optimist, and gave another caper from sheer lightness of heart. "How do ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... the disappointment struck Johnnie silent. Pros Passmore was an optimist, one who never used a strong word to express sorrow or dismay, but he came out of a brown study in which he had muttered, "Blaylock. No, Harp wouldn't do. Culp's. Sally Ann's not to be trusted. What about the Venable boys? No good"—to ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... perceived that Annaple's cheerful tact enabled her to deal with him as no one else could do. There was the restraint of courtesy towards her, such as had worn out towards his daughter, and besides her sanguine optimist spirit never became so depressed as did poor Nuttie's. Mark went by day to his work, but came back to dine at his uncle's, hear the reports, and do what he could for him; and meantime Annaple spent the chief part of the day in aiding Nuttie and Mr. Egremont, while her baby really showed signs ...
— Nuttie's Father • Charlotte M. Yonge
... Hall's affair to keep Mark Twain cheerful, to look pleasant himself, and to show how they were steadily getting rich because orders were pouring in, though a cloud that resembled bankruptcy loomed always a little higher upon the horizon. If Hall had not been young and an optimist, he would have been frightened out of his boots early in the game. As it was, he made a brave steady fight, kept as cheerful and stiff an upper lip as possible, always hoping that something would happen—some grand sale of his ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... always seemed to say things calculated to make his chums feel more satisfied. It is a mighty good thing to have a real optimist in camp, especially when the weather gets bad, and everything else seems to go wrong. Even Bandy-legs took on a more cheerful air, and brightened up after hearing Max say this. They had more or less reason to feel proud of the record they had made in the past, so far as accomplishing ...
— At Whispering Pine Lodge • Lawrence J. Leslie
... content to go into modest rooms—they must furnish a flat. I rather wonder he didn't start a carriage for her. Well, his next book brought only another hundred, and now, even if he finishes this one, it's very doubtful if he'll get as much. "The Optimist" was ...
— New Grub Street • George Gissing
... would adopt. Then Carew called from the camp and she went back, while Millicent sat still with grave doubts in her heart. Bella's faith in her husband was warranted, and Millicent was enough of an optimist to believe that such men were not uncommon—there was Lisle, for example, and Nasmyth. With them one would undoubtedly have something to build a happy and profitable life upon—but what could be done with one in whom there was no foundation, only the shifting sands of impulses, or, perhaps, unsounded ...
— The Long Portage • Harold Bindloss
... man to be happy? Yet he was an optimist. He was always gleeful and laughing. All things were always all right, curse him! Ah I how it grated on my soul that he should be so happy! Other men could laugh, and it did not bother me. I even used to laugh myself—before ...
— Moon-Face and Other Stories • Jack London
... but the worst of our books illustrate it. Our popular books are carbuncles mostly. They are the inevitable and irrepressible form of the instinct of health in us, struggling with disease. On the whole, it makes being an optimist in modern life a little less of a tight-rope-walk. If even the bad elements in current literature—which are discouraging enough—are making us better, what shall be ...
— The Lost Art of Reading • Gerald Stanley Lee
... Evangeline, the optimist, was busy scratching up the more or less kindly fruits of the earth for her family and didn't make the slightest sign of recognition, though I ...
— Punch or the London Charivari, September 9, 1914 • Various
... he helped her out of the way of Champion were not in accordance with his words to-night, and that the dimly-realized kiss during her faintness was no imaginary one. But in the blissful circumstances of having Bob at hand again she took optimist views, and persuaded herself that John would soon begin to see her in the light of ...
— The Trumpet-Major • Thomas Hardy
... match for the game's sake will always be a fine sportsman, for there is no amusement to a match that does not give your opponent his every right. A player who plays for the joy of the game wins the crowd the first time he steps on the court. All the world loves an optimist. ...
— The Art of Lawn Tennis • William T. Tilden, 2D
... endured by human beings at about two minutes' suffering in a century. Hartley maintained the still more remarkable thesis that, in some non-natural sense, 'all individuals are always and actually infinitely happy.' But Edwards, though an optimist in a very different sense, was alone amongst contemporary writers of any speculative power in asserting at once the doctrine that all events are the result of the Divine will, and the doctrine of eternal damnation. His mind, acute as it was, yet worked entirely in the groove provided for ...
— Hours in a Library, Volume I. (of III.) • Leslie Stephen
... pondering with the papers in her lap. She was more frightened at her mother's news than she would show. They were mere girls, she and Mollie, and their little mother had no knowledge of business. She shook herself impatiently. Barbara was an optimist—things would ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... At finding you, beneath your lion's skin, So sweet an optimist—whose faith can find All's for the best; and the best, this great year ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... all this, after his simple fashion, and said so; his companion did not answer immediately; he only shrugged his shoulders and lifted his eyebrows, as if he could have disputed the point if it had not been too much trouble. An optimist in nothing, least of all was Royston Keene grateful or indulgent to the beauties and bounties of ...
— Sword and Gown - A Novel • George A. Lawrence
... side is heeded now— (Ah! optimist-cheer disheartened flown)— A child may read the moody brow Of yon black mountain lone. With shouts the torrents down the gorges go, And storms are formed behind the storm we feel: The hemlock shakes in the rafter, the oak in the ...
— Battle-Pieces and Aspects of the War • Herman Melville
... to the first, I am no optimist, but I have the firmest belief that the Divine Government (if we may use such a phrase to express the sum of the "customs of matter") is wholly just. The more I know intimately of the lives of other men (to say nothing of my own), the more obvious it is to me that the ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... tail at an aimless angle, without chic; her markings were all lopsided. But her soul was ardent, and her life was always directed by some rather inscrutable theory or other. As a puppy she had been an inspired optimist, with legs like strips of elastic clumsily attached to a winged spirit. Later she had adopted a vigorous anarchist policy, and had inaugurated what was probably known in her set as the "Bite at Sight ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... been discussions and disputes as to speed, and John's wagon, a long, well-oiled affair with a coat of red, discarded house paint on its framework, had come to grief in a collision with Brown's, one sunny afternoon. Even Silvey, the optimist, who had furnished the motive power, had looked at the wreckage in ...
— A Son of the City - A Story of Boy Life • Herman Gastrell Seely
... "You're a bun-headed old optimist," said the Puddin' rudely. "Puddin'-thieves never suffer from remorse. They only suffer from ...
— The Magic Pudding • Norman Lindsay
... man, the path would have been clear and easy, but he was poor, having no means but those derived from his instrument-making business, which for some time had necessarily been neglected. Where was the daring optimist who could be induced to risk so much in an enterprise of this character, where result was problematical. Here, Watt's best friend, Professor Black, who had himself from his own resources from time to time ...
— James Watt • Andrew Carnegie
... of all established things, and to his horror saw men, instead of covering the thin surface with the concrete, digging in it for abstractions, and asking fundamental questions about the origin of society, and why one man should be born rich and another poor. Burke was no prating optimist: it was his very knowledge how much could be said against society that quickened his fears for it. There is no shallower criticism than that which accuses Burke in his later years of apostasy from so-called ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... an optimist," replied Percy laughingly. "Soils do not wear out; there is no poor land; the farms are better and the crops larger than ever before; and we are the people of the world's greatest nation, with an assured future glory which ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins
... the Naturphilosophie, and the Encyclopdie,—has recently emerged into clear and respectful recognition, if not into broad and effulgent repute. In divers quarters, of late, the attention of the learned has reverted to the splendid optimist, whose adventurous intellect left nothing unexplored and almost nothing unexplained. Biographers and critics have discussed his theories,—some in the interest of philosophy, and some in the interest of religion,—some in the spirit of discipleship, and some in the ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... man our combination decided on, but the trouble is that our combination is going to fall through. Sam's an optimist, but you'll see I'm right. There are too many conflicting elements of us in one boat. We can't lose three votes and win, and it's a safe bet we lose them. The Consolidated must know by this time what we have been ...
— Ridgway of Montana - (Story of To-Day, in Which the Hero Is Also the Villain) • William MacLeod Raine
... Sam's situation, nor was he in the least curious concerning the gossip of the country. This comforted Sam strangely. Ed was a little, trim, round-headed man, with a cropped thatch of white, and dancing brown eyes. Sixty years had in nowise impaired his vigour. He was an incorrigible optimist and a dreamer. ...
— The Huntress • Hulbert Footner
... the incident I have just related threw my life into a tangle that would have floored a less persistent optimist and romanticist than myself, yet I became fairly accustomed to treading what the old moralists called the devious paths of sin. In my passion I had not hesitated to lay down the doctrine that the courageous and ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope ...
— The Devil's Dictionary • Ambrose Bierce
... "You wouldn't be here unless you knew where a good thing is to be picked up. But I must be off. I'm on the Rocky Mountain Canal Company Directory. I'm not above taking my two guineas a day. Good-by, my boy. Remember me to old Optimist." And so Sir Raffle passed on, leaving Crosbie still standing at the ...
— The Last Chronicle of Barset • Anthony Trollope
... you're disgusted, Chet. But be an optimist. I might 'a' busted you high and wide with that quirt instead of giving you a nice little easy tap that just did the business. There's no manner of use being regretful over past mistakes," ...
— The Sheriff's Son • William MacLeod Raine
... "You're an optimist, Loring," said Stone, who was ever seeking yet never succeeding in the effort to penetrate the armor of Loring's reserve. "I believe you think even Burleigh would fight at ...
— A Wounded Name • Charles King
... irrepressible optimist. "He can't fail! The bigger the crowd the better he will rise ...
— The Candidate - A Political Romance • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... with you. I think it is the business of imagination to project things as they really are. I don't want to slip out from under reality and see only beauty. Beware, Madeline, or you will degenerate into a mere optimist." ...
— Jewel Weed • Alice Ames Winter
... neared the cottage," said Doctor Grenfell, "his good wife, beaming from head to foot as usual, came out to greet us. Optimist to the last ditch, she knew that somehow provision would be made. She, too, had had her troubles, for twice she had been operated on ...
— The Story of Grenfell of the Labrador - A Boy's Life of Wilfred T. Grenfell • Dillon Wallace
... man, hardly more than five feet high, with small but honest-looking eyes, and close-cut hair, was standing behind the arm-chair, rubbing his hands together, and longing for the departure of Sir Raffle, in order that he might sit down. This was Mr Optimist, the new chairman, in praise of whose appointment the Daily Jupiter had been so loud, declaring that the present Minister was showing himself superior to all Ministers who had ever gone before him, in giving promotion solely on the ...
— The Small House at Allington • Anthony Trollope
... to continue writing, but found it useless. Until then he had lived the life of a man in middle life—and a young one at that—golfing, fishing, swimming each day, sometimes doing all three in one day. Optimist as he always was and tried to be, even in the face of the failure of his hopes, the world disaster was too much. His heart was broken. A severe attack of influenza followed by two serious attacks of pneumonia ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... seemed to make a mystic answering. He was a romantic—some would have said a sentimental person, with a poet always in his pocket, and a hunger for all that might shield him from the worst uglinesses of life, and the worst despairs of thought; an optimist, and, in his own sense, Christian. He had come abroad to wander alone for a time, because as one of the busiest, most important and most popular men in a wide country-side, he had had a year of unceasing and ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... as the center and pillar of health. Much of what is called her subservience, and even her pliability, is merely the subservience and pliability of a universal remedy; she varies as medicines vary, with the disease. She has to be an optimist to the morbid husband, a salutary pessimist to the happy-go-lucky husband. She has to prevent the Quixote from being put upon, and the bully from putting upon others. ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... Bootstrap-lifters. There are the thousand varieties of "New Thought" Bootstrap-lifters; the mystic and transcendentalist, Swedenborgian and Jacob Boehme Bootstrap-lifters; the Elbert Hubbard high-art Bootstrap-lifters with half a million magazinelets at two bits apiece; the "uplift" and "optimist," the Ralph Waldo Trine and Orison Swett Marden Bootstrap-lifters with a hundred thousand volumes at one dollar per volume. There are the Platonist and Hegelian and Kantian professors of collegiate metaphysical Bootstrap-lifting at several thousand dollars per year ...
— The Profits of Religion, Fifth Edition • Upton Sinclair
... Pre-Raphaelites in a new country. But give us three or four hundred years, and we'll produce old masters which, if you ladies will excuse the expression, will knock the spots out of the Middle Ages." Poppa is such an optimist about Chicago. ...
— A Voyage of Consolation - (being in the nature of a sequel to the experiences of 'An - American girl in London') • Sara Jeannette Duncan
... tendencies of others, is not might, right? And if might be right, why murmur at anything that is? For everything that is, exists by virtue of its might: and every thing that perishes, perishes in virtue of its weakness. Are you not sanctioning the doctrine of the Optimist, and saying ...
— Modern Skepticism: A Journey Through the Land of Doubt and Back Again - A Life Story • Joseph Barker
... approach of a storm when no sign is visible in the calm sky above, so the events which will befall an individual are marked upon the delicate spiritual barometer which forms a part of his being, and can be read with unerring precision by the clear and practiced eye of the optimist. ...
— Strange Visitors • Henry J. Horn
... too attractive. But for the wearing, tearing, slow, and dreadful business of this war, the Englishman—fighting of his own free will, unimaginative, humorous, competitive, practical, never in extremes, a dumb, inveterate optimist, and terribly tenacious—is undoubtedly ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... it, I hope," said Number Seven, who is in some points as much of an optimist as any one among us, in spite of the squint in his brain,—or in virtue of it, if you ...
— Over the Teacups • Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr.
... will be deceived just the same," said Athos, who was an optimist when things were concerned, and a pessimist when men were in question. "They will promise everything for the sake of the money, and on the road fear will prevent them from acting. Once taken, they will be pressed; when pressed, they will confess everything. What the ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... it isn't much to ask. Here we are and the hour's peculiarly propitious—long light days with no one coming near me, so that I've plenty of time. I had a hope I should have some orders: my younger sister, whom you know and who's a great optimist, plied me with that vision. In fact we invented together a charming little sordid theory that there might be rather a 'run' on me from the chatter (such as it was) produced by my taking up this line. ...
— The Tragic Muse • Henry James
... fillip. The wits by which he had once lived so merrily had been getting blunt in their easy retirement. He welcomed the opportunity of matching them once more against the world. He was remorseful as regarded Jill, but the optimist in him, never crushed for long, told him that Jill would be all right. She would step from the sinking ship to the safe refuge of Derek Underhill's wealth and position, while he went out to seek a new life. Uncle Chris' blue eyes gleamed with a new fire as he pictured himself in this new ...
— The Little Warrior - (U.K. Title: Jill the Reckless) • P. G. Wodehouse
... felt it as a dividing line between them. He probably felt so at college; and this brings us back to an old subject. Hawthorne's superiority to Longfellow as an artist consisted essentially in this, that he was never an optimist. Puritanism looked upon human nature with a hostile eye, and was inclined to see evil in it where none existed; and Doctor Channing, who inaugurated the great moral movement which swept Puritanism away in this country, tended, as ...
— The Life and Genius of Nathaniel Hawthorne • Frank Preston Stearns
... banded with the Red-Cross badge. Then he shuffled back to his former post and sat himself down on his heels once more. Kruger Bobs possessed the racial traits which make it an easy matter to sit and wait for news. He was also an optimist. Nevertheless, his face now was overcast and rarely did it vanish behind the spreading limits ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... he preached. He did not preach renunciation; he was not a Pessimist any more than an Optimist. Sometimes he felt he was not doing enough; he knew very well that others thought so. I remember his saying, in his rooms at Oxford in one of those years: "Here I am, trying to reform the world, and I suppose I ought to begin with myself, I am trying to do St. Benedict's work, and ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... could see the cover through the wrapper of my sealed copy. The dark green morocco, I said, in summing up, typified the author's serious view of life, as a thing to be endured as patiently as might be. The cap-and-bells border was significant of the shams by which the optimist sought to delude himself into the view that life was a desirable thing. The intricate blind-tooling of the doublure shadowed forth the blind fate which left us in ignorance of our future and our past, or of even what the day itself ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... intensify it. Of the neutrals, some are too weak and others too timid to enter an energetic protest against this violation of international law. The freight-carrying capacity of the transports still available is less than the British optimist realizes. How much less, it would be unfruitful to inquire. It is enough to know that in this matter, too, we had better seek a more helpful ally than time. Those who are most conversant with these elements of the problem are haunted by a restive ...
— England and Germany • Emile Joseph Dillon
... like to give you a dollar but I don't dare take more from my egg money for Eliza would find it out if I did. I'm real interested in your society and I believe you're going to do a lot of good. I'm an optimist. I HAVE to be, living with Eliza. I must hurry back before she misses me . . . she thinks I'm feeding the hens. I hope you'll have good luck canvassing, and don't be cast down over what Eliza said. The world IS getting better . ...
— Anne Of Avonlea • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... Arnold is a profound optimist, and apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said to ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... in so doing he entertained or gratified others, so much the better. "Reform away," he was once reported as saying, "reform away, but as for me, the world is good enough for me as it is. I am a thorough optimist. In temperament I'm a little like old Horace—I want to get all the happiness out of the world that's possible." And he got it, not intermittently and in chunks, but day by day and ...
— Eugene Field, A Study In Heredity And Contradictions - Vol. I • Slason Thompson
... prepared," his companion answered. "It may be that he is my only companion. In that case, I go back to a life lonelier than I have ever dreamed of. It is on the knees of the gods. So far there has come no word, but although I am not by nature an optimist, my superstitions are on my side. All the way over on my last voyage, when I lay in my berth, awake and we sailed over and through the clouds, my star, my own particular star, seemed leaning always down towards me, and for that reason ...
— The Great Prince Shan • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... for one who ever cherished ideal aspirations, for the student, the "man of books" (as his father had been banteringly wont to term him), worshipper of the muses, intellectual Epicurean, and would-be optimist philosopher, it must be admitted he had strangely dealt, and been dealt with, since he first beheld that face, now returned to light his solitude! Ah, God bless the child! Pulwick at least nursed it warmly, ...
— The Light of Scarthey • Egerton Castle
... gentlemanly little optimist, and I like you, old fellow," retorted Cullen. "But don't deceive yourself too much. Your Senator Langdon is personally one of the best ever. But he was born a mark, and a mark he'll be to the ...
— A Gentleman from Mississippi • Thomas A. Wise
... succeed without being clever or good, but neither did Graham pass this doubtful and dangerous test. For when you clear away the romance which heroic poetry and excited prose have flung around him, you were an optimist if you did not see his life was one long failure as well as a disappointment and a sorrow. He did bravely with the Prince of Orange, and yet somehow he missed promotion; he was the best officer the government had in Scotland, and yet it was only in the last resort he became commander-in-chief. ...
— Graham of Claverhouse • Ian Maclaren
... calamities, means to appeal to the very author of these calamities in order to represent to Him our welfare; that He ought to rectify in our favor His plan, which is not beneficial to our interests. The optimist, or the one who thinks that everything is good in the world, and who repeats to us incessantly that we live in the best world possible, if he were consistent, ought never to pray; still less should he expect another world where men will be happier. Can there be a better world than the best possible ...
— Superstition In All Ages (1732) - Common Sense • Jean Meslier
... sight of this ten-kroner note, which shone ever more plainly out of the darkness and swept all privations aside. When Pelle sat at this work his mind soared above all oppression as though intoxicated; unhappy things no longer existed for him. He became an optimist and mentally made Ellen ...
— Pelle the Conqueror, Complete • Martin Andersen Nexo
... and foreseen it. Practical, clear-minded, of firm will, imbued with the notion of State, he possessed in the highest degree the qualities his new subjects most lacked. He knew neither doubts nor vain hesitations; he was an optimist, always sure of success: not with the certitude of the blind who walk confidently to the river, but with the assurance of clear-sighted people, who leave the goddess Fortune so little to do, it were a miracle if she did less for them. His lucid and persistent will is never ...
— A Literary History of the English People - From the Origins to the Renaissance • Jean Jules Jusserand
... morning near the close of the second week of their stay, the usual radiation of resilient youth was conspicuously absent from the young man's demeanor, and the child's face reflected the gloom that sat so incongruously on the contour of an optimist. The little girl fumbled her menu card, but the waitress—the usual aging pedagogic type of the small residential hotel—stood unnoticed at the young man's elbow for some minutes before he was sufficiently aroused from ...
— Turn About Eleanor • Ethel M. Kelley
... The optimist is right. The pessimist is right. The one differs from the other as the light from the dark. Yet both are right. Each is right from his own particular point of view, and this point of view is the determining factor in the life of each. It determines as to whether it is a life of power ...
— In Tune with the Infinite - or, Fullness of Peace, Power, and Plenty • Ralph Waldo Trine
... innocent question, 'Are you an anarchist?' which is intrinsically quite as impudent as 'Are you an optimist?' or 'Are you a philanthropist?' I am not discussing here whether these things are right, but whether most of us are in a position to know them rightly. Now it is quite true that most Englishmen do not find it necessary to go about all day asking each other whether they ...
— What I Saw in America • G. K. Chesterton
... ill-advised optimist ventured to question a particularly lugubrious statement, he was challenged to explain the betting, which had crept up to six to one on ...
— Malcolm Sage, Detective • Herbert George Jenkins
... optimist stares a moment, turns pale, and then, with an oath, strikes his more clear-headed neighbor in the face! And the excited crowd behind, with the blind instinctive feeling that, somehow, he has robbed them of the hope which was but now as the breath of life to them, ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... snow already fallen and brought more. The blizzard enveloped Prouty until it required something more than normal courage to venture out of doors. It was the courage of desperation which ultimately sent Neifkins out in an attempt to get hay to his sheep. There was small resemblance between the optimist who had assured Wentz so confidently that everything would be all right and the perspiring and all but exhausted Neifkins who wallowed in snow to his arm-pits in an effort to break trail for the four-horse team whose driver was displaying increasing reluctance to go on with the load of baled hay ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... clergymen in my day, but his reading is beautiful; I can't say as I ever heard reading as could equal it;—and them choristers, though they're hawful to manage, is trained as I never see boys trained in my life afore. There's one of them houses, ma'am," continued the optimist, turning to Miss Wentworth, "as is a beauty. Miss Wodehouse can tell you what it is; no lady in the land could desire a handsomer drawing-room; and as for the kitchings,—I don't pretend to be a judge ...
— The Perpetual Curate • Mrs [Margaret] Oliphant
... remarks on the literature of heroism; the claim for our own America, for Massachusetts and Connecticut River and Boston Bay, in spite of our love for the names of foreign and classic topography; and most of all one sentence which, coming from an optimist like Emerson, has a sound of ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... Cuthbert stuck it without a cry. But the strain was terrible and I am inclined to think that he must have cracked, had it not been for the daily reports in the papers of the internecine strife which was proceeding so briskly in Russia. Cuthbert was an optimist at heart, and it seemed to him that, at the rate at which the inhabitants of that interesting country were murdering one another, the supply of Russian novelists must eventually ...
— The Clicking of Cuthbert • P. G. Wodehouse
... was a kind of sixteenth-century Heraclitus, seeing the flow and flux of all things temporal, finding paradox and contradiction everywhere, discovering life to be a clash of opposites, with its "way up" and its "way down," on the surface a pessimist, but at the heart of himself an optimist; and finally, beneath all the folly of history and all the sin and stupidity of human life, seeing with the eye of his spirit One Eternal Logos who steers all things toward purpose, who suffers as a Lamb slain for the flock, ...
— Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries • Rufus M. Jones
... held his own against the world! how he has scourged its wickedness and folly, this gigantic optimist, who never wrote a single line ...
— The Martian • George Du Maurier
... jumped up in the person of Mr. Flummery Flam, the least insinuating and the least plausible personage that ever performed the easy task of gulling a nation. His manners were vulgar, his voice was sharp, and his language almost unintelligible. Flummery Flam was a provisional optimist. He maintained that everything would be for the best, if the nation would only follow his advice. He told the Vraibleusians that the present universal and overwhelming distress was all and entirely and merely to be ascribed to 'a slight over-trading,' ...
— The Voyage of Captain Popanilla • Benjamin Disraeli
... view of the misery and disorder which pervaded society, and fatigued with jostling against artificial fools, Rousseau became enamoured of solitude, and, being at the same time an optimist, he labours with uncommon eloquence to prove that man was naturally a solitary animal. Misled by his respect for the goodness of God, who certainly for what man of sense and feeling can doubt it! gave life only to communicate happiness, he considers evil as positive, and ...
— A Vindication of the Rights of Woman - Title: Vindication of the Rights of Women • Mary Wollstonecraft [Godwin]
... how this optimist was acquainted with pain. It will seem strange only to the superficial. The disease of pessimism springs never from real troubles, which it braces men to bear, which it delights men to bear well. Nor does it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as a field of ordered ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... extended himself in honor of the house party, and had produced a succession of dishes, which in happier days Mr. Peters would have devoured eagerly. To be compelled by considerations of health to pass these by was enough to damp the liveliest optimist. Mr. Peters had suffered terribly. Occasions of feasting and revelry like the present were for him so many battlefields, on which greed ...
— Something New • Pelham Grenville Wodehouse
... philosophy ultimately represented by the snake devouring his tail; the awful sceptical argument in a circle by which everything begins and ends in the mind. I would far rather be a fetish worshipper and have a little fun, than be an oriental pessimist expected always to smile like an optimist. Now it seems to me that the fighting Christian creed is the one thing that has been in that mystical circle and broken out of it, and become something real as well. It has gone westward by a sort of centrifugal force, like a stone from a sling; and so made the revolving Eastern ...
— The New Jerusalem • G. K. Chesterton
... Hickory-nuts I could a staid if I'd a wanted to, but I didn't want to. If loyalty to party is a form of patriotism, I am no patriot Lecky Livy, if it comforts you to lean on the Christian faith do so! Modest" Club My advice is not to raise the flag Operas Optimist Pessimist Pretty soon we shall have been dead a hundred years Religion Resenting, even when most amused by it, extravagance and burles Rubaiyat Style that is not a style at all but the very absence of it Symbol of the race ...
— Widger's Quotations from Albert Bigelow Paine on Mark Twain • David Widger
... is one point in common between Lilienblum, the last of the humanists, the disillusioned skeptic, and Pines, the optimist of the ghetto. Both maintained that the action of the humanists was inefficacious, and the compromise between religion and life a vain expedient. Nevertheless, there was no possibility of bringing the two to stand upon the same platform. While the humanists, ...
— The Renascence of Hebrew Literature (1743-1885) • Nahum Slouschz
... He was temperamentally an optimist, but depression rode with him to the gold camp and did not lift from his spirits till he started back next day for Kusiak. The news had been flashed by wire all over the United States that he was a crook. His friends and relatives could give ...
— The Yukon Trail - A Tale of the North • William MacLeod Raine
... by the expenditure in Afghanistan; and it was not easy in a period of turmoil and rebellion to carry out the amendment of a fiscal system. That, since the surrender of the Dost, there had been no serious rising in Northern or Eastern Afghanistan, sufficed to make Macnaghten an optimist of the moment. He had come by this time to a reluctant admission of the fact against which he had set his face so long, that Shah Soojah was unpopular. 'He has incurred,' he wrote, 'the odium that attaches to ...
— The Afghan Wars 1839-42 and 1878-80 • Archibald Forbes
... optimist than Napoleon might well have hoped for success over the forces of the new coalition. True, they seemed overwhelmingly great. But many a coalition had crumbled away under the alchemy of his statecraft; and the jealousies that had raged at the Congress of Vienna inspired the ...
— The Life of Napoleon I (Volumes, 1 and 2) • John Holland Rose
... roused. "Why, then I fell in with Kellogg again; he found me trying the open-air cure on a bench in Washington Square. Since then he's been finding me one berth after another. He's a sure-enough optimist." ...
— The Fortune Hunter • Louis Joseph Vance
... world, but the world has outlived them all. Like tempests, they may wreck a royal fleet now and then, but they prevent the ocean from being a pond, and the air from being a pestilence. I am content if the world is the better for all this, though France may be the worse. I am a political optimist, in spite of Voltaire; or, I agree with a better man and a greater poet—'All's well that ...
— Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine — Volume 54, No. 335, September 1843 • Various
... I was joined by two young Irish soldiers. I don't know who or what they took me for; certainly not for the Generalissimo. They came along with me and discussed identical adventures from diametrically different standpoints. One, in fact, was an optimist; the other a pessimist. One found fault with the war for not giving him enough hardship and adventure; the other was entirely fed up with adventures and hardships. This seems a trivial incident to jot down amidst issues so tremendous, but life is life, and my chat with these ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... optimist, and that spontaneous optimism is his distinctive mark among all the novelists of the contemporary school. There are characters in his works quite as depraved as those in Flaubert and in Zola. But from the way in which he describes ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... beyond the reach of the nine-tenths in the midst of whom they live, and around whose homes they rot and die? No doubt, in every large mass of human beings there will be some incurably diseased in morals and in body, some for whom nothing can be done, some of whom even the optimist must despair, and for whom he can prescribe nothing but the beneficently stern restraints of an ...
— "In Darkest England and The Way Out" • General William Booth
... his career. To be sure, his career was not of much value at present, and didn't seem a large thing to sacrifice; but then, when it comes to giving anything away, even the most thorough-paced pessimist is capable of turning optimist about its worth. ...
— Murder Point - A Tale of Keewatin • Coningsby Dawson
... host of unemployed citizens face the grim problem of existence, and an equally great number toil with little return. Only a foolish optimist can deny the dark realities of ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... optimist and persuades himself he is improving, he does improve. This is the explanation of "Faith moving mountains", for the curative power of prayer, Christian Science, laying-on of hands, suggestion treatment and patent medicine, depends ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... possibility," Stubby continued, quite cheerfully, however. "I don't propose to allow it to happen. Hang it, I wouldn't blat this to any one but you, Jack. The mater has only a hazy idea of how things stand, and she's an incurable optimist anyway. Nelly and the Infant—you haven't met the Infant yet—don't know anything about it. I tell you it put the breeze up when I got able to go into our affairs and learned how things stood. I thought I'd get mended and then be a giddy idler for a year or so. But it's up to me. ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... general." Thomas Hardy is recognized as the finest living English novelist, but there is very little comparison between himself and Meredith. Professor William Lyon Phelps, who is one of the best and sanest of American critics, says they are both pagans, but Meredith was an optimist, while Hardy is a pessimist. Then he adds this illuminating comment: "Mr. Hardy is a great novelist; whereas, to adapt a phrase that Arnold applied to Emerson, I should say that Mr. Meredith was not a great novelist; he was a great ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... near the surface, and is nothing but the vividness of his dialogues. It is a great deal more; it lies in the truth of his characters, subtly drawn, but irresistible, and, now and again, tenderly pathetic. Thus may you see the optimist and pessimist, and the link between them, in the following scene in ...
— The History of "Punch" • M. H. Spielmann
... his doubts of the voyage. So had the steward, who had spent most of a life-time in sailing- ships. So far as Captain West was concerned, crews did not exist. And as for Miss West, she was so abominably robust that she could not be anything else than an optimist in such matters. She had always lived; her red blood sang to her only that she would always live and that nothing evil would ever ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... black pessimist as regards the present and to-morrow; convinced that things are not, and cannot be, what they were; but as regards the further future, the day after to-morrow, he is a resolute optimist. "Never mind how bad things du look, summut or other'll sure to turn up. It always du. I've a-proved it. I've a-see'd it scores o' times." He can earn money by drifting for mackerel and herring, hooking mackerel, seining for mackerel, sprats, flat-fish, mullet ...
— A Poor Man's House • Stephen Sydney Reynolds
... it with its probable origins, we see that the human race has not altogether wasted its time. Hence there are three possible views of history: the view of the pessimist, who starts from the ideal; the view of the optimist, who compares the past with the present; and the view of the hero-worshiper, who sees that all progress whatever has cost oceans ...
— Amiel's Journal • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... of his upholders and all his opponents say, an optimist. His theory, that man's sense of his own imperfection implies a design of perfection, is a very good argument for optimism. His theory that man's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice implies God's knowledge of and desire for self-sacrifice ...
— Robert Browning • G. K. Chesterton
... alley, of which no one could see the outlet. The negro had become a target at which any one might try a shot. Schoolboys gravely debated the question as to whether or not the negro should exercise the franchise. The pessimist gave him up in despair; while the optimist, smilingly confident that everything would come out all right in the end, also turned aside and went his buoyant way ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... the fifty of the hard-riding optimist of the great outdoors. The smooth tan of his cheeks contrasted oddly with the silver of his close-cropped hair. He appeared as a young man ...
— Overland Red - A Romance of the Moonstone Canon Trail • Henry Herbert Knibbs |
