"Pessimistic" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... that a provincial city intended soon to invite competitive designs for a building of realty enormous proportions, and took oath that in no case should his firm, enter for the competition. In short, his condition was markedly pessimistic. ...
— The Roll-Call • Arnold Bennett
... idea that the mail-sleigh, in which the musicians were to travel, had been delayed by the storm, and might break its way through the snow-drifts and arrive at any moment. But Bill Moody, who was naturally of a pessimistic temperament, had offered a ...
— The Ruling Passion • Henry van Dyke
... 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 ...
— The Land of Contrasts - A Briton's View of His American Kin • James Fullarton Muirhead
... 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 behind ...
— What is Coming? • H. G. Wells
... one 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 ...
— Smoke Bellew • Jack London
... the ranch-hands of the Flying Heart without engendering hostile relations that might bear fruit during the day. This morning Still Bill Stover had more than his customary share of trouble, for they seemed pessimistic. ...
— Going Some • Rex Beach
... but must admire on others. They conduct their love affairs in an even more tragic style. In every event matrimony is a tragedy, but in the case of spiders it is a catastrophe. Spiders are a very sour and pessimistic people who live in walls, corners of hotel bedrooms and holes generally, in which places they weave very delicate webs, and sit for a long period in a state of philosophic ecstasy, contemplating the ...
— Here are Ladies • James Stephens
... 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 instruments, such as the plethysmograph ...
— The Joyful Heart • Robert Haven Schauffler
... 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 ...
— In Search of El Dorado • Harry Collingwood
... once began to give Lennon a pessimistic account of the small profits and many risks and hardships of a trader's life in this arid land of mesas and canons. As for the cattle business, there was more work than money in it, what with mountain lions, wolves, ...
— Bloom of Cactus • Robert Ames Bennet
... of arresting the movement before it had more fully advanced, he dissolved parliament prematurely and appealed to the people in mid-winter. In this resolve he was perhaps influenced by a growing consciousness of his failing physical strength. He was less pessimistic as to the result of the election than in 1887, yet he considered his chances of success not more than even. As on previous occasions, he had recourse to Sir Charles Tupper, to whom he cabled on January 21, 1891: 'Your presence during election contest in ...
— The Day of Sir John Macdonald - A Chronicle of the First Prime Minister of the Dominion • Joseph Pope
... all along 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 ...
— The Last Hope • Henry Seton Merriman
... gazing at the old church that had seen the end of so many sorrows more bitter than her own, and the wreck of so many summers, till the darkness began to close round her like a pall, while the wind sung the requiem of her hopes. Ida was not of a desponding or pessimistic character, but in that bitter hour she found it in her heart, as most people have at one time or another in their lives, to wish the tragedy over and the curtain down, and that she lay beneath those dripping sods without sight or hearing, without hope or dread. It seemed to her that the Hereafter ...
— Colonel Quaritch, V.C. - A Tale of Country Life • H. Rider Haggard
... 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 ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, April 1887 - Volume 1, Number 3 • Various
... the interview would not be pleasant," she said. "But you are pessimistic, captain. I have not said I loved you. Do not be alarmed. I was going to say I pitied you. ...
— The Unspeakable Gentleman • John P. Marquand
... did not reply. His silence was not deliberate; he had been so absorbed in his own pessimistic musings that he had not heard the question, that was all. ...
— Shavings • Joseph C. Lincoln
... pessimistic frame of mind when Jimmy curveted into the room, with his head in the clouds and his ...
— The Gem Collector • P. G. Wodehouse
... more, for since she had come to know Pierre her love had caused her to be filled with the tastes and distastes of her friend; but that was not her fundamental nature. Calm and smiling by reason of her race, not pessimistic at all. Melancholy, and the grand detached airs of life were not her business. Life is as it is. Let us take it as it is! It might have been worse! The hazards of an existence which Luce had always known to be precarious, on the ...
— Pierre and Luce • Romain Rolland
... of the Party were pessimistic about the new campaign. Messrs Dillon, Davitt and T.P. O'Connor wrote a letter to Mr O'Brien remonstrating with him, in a tone of gentle courtesy, on the extreme character of his speeches and actions. But Mr O'Brien was not to be deflected from his purpose by any friendly pipings of this kind. ...
— Ireland Since Parnell • Daniel Desmond Sheehan
... grimly gay, My volumes sell, and sometimes pay. First log-rollers raised a rumour of a rising Star of Humour, Who had faced the Sphinx called Life, With amusing misery rife, So with sin, and woe, and strife, I thought I'd have a lark. With pessimistic pick I pottered round Pottered round, A new "funny" trick I quickly found, Smart and sound, Life's cares in hedonistic chuckles drowned, You be bound! The cynic lay I found would pay, In ...
— Punch, Or The London Charivari, Vol. 102, Jan. 9, 1892 • Various
... answer you. I'm afraid I've been stupid, but I was so pessimistic about these verses that I wouldn't show them to him. I thought I would get an outside criticism first, just to save my face," she hurried on, anxious in reality to save ...
— The Nest Builder • Beatrice Forbes-Robertson Hale
... read the 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
... all such pessimistic voices came the glad soul of Robert Louis Stevenson, whose old-fashioned revelling in the situation is the exact counter-blast to Hardy's modernism, and is one of those perennial human things which are ever both new and old. It is not that Stevenson ...
— Among Famous Books • John Kelman
... an intellect that had worn itself out in vainly seeking for the solution of the riddle of the universe, vainly striving after a theory that should reconcile nature's brute law with the human demand for justice and immanent goodness. By original temperament an optimist, he changed and grew pessimistic with the untoward happenings of his agitated career, and under the fostering of his native self-esteem. Possibly too, as Le Breton asserts, a secondary cause was his having imbibed the pretentious doctrines of the Romantic school, ...
— Balzac • Frederick Lawton
... 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 ...
— The Woman's Bible. • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
... would break at once to relieve the strain from which nature seemed to suffer. Whether it was the fatigue of his day's labour, or the late interview with Bell which depressed him, he did not know, but he felt singularly pessimistic and his mind was filled with premonitions of ill. Like most people with highly-strung natures, Gabriel was easily affected by atmospheric influence, so no doubt the palpable electricity in the dry, hot air depressed his nerves, but whether this was the cause of his restlessness ...
— The Bishop's Secret • Fergus Hume
... whom I associated 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 ...
— The Broad Highway • Jeffery Farnol
... has 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 ...
— An Anarchist Woman • Hutchins Hapgood
... old along with me. Cf. Saul, lines 161-162. See Matthew Arnold's "'Tis time to grow old" for a beautiful statement of the pessimistic attitude toward old age. ...
— Selections from the Poems and Plays of Robert Browning • Robert Browning
... statement, however, Mr. Kirkwood was fortunately mistaken; not only Heaven, it appeared, had cognizance of the distance between the two stations. While Kirkwood was still debating the question, with pessimistic tendencies, the friendly guard had occasion to pass through the coach; and, being tapped, yielded the ...
— The Black Bag • Louis Joseph Vance
... Pacific Union Club that the Southern Pacific 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 ...
— The Readjustment • Will Irwin
... arises is: "Why does he not divide all feelings into pleasurable and not-pleasurable, rather than into 'painful and not-painful'?" A Westerner will not be at a loss to answer that: "Oh, the Hindu is naturally so very pessimistic, that he naturally ignores pleasure and speaks of painful and not-painful. The universe is full of pain." But that would not be a true answer. In the first place the Hindu is not pessimistic. He is the most optimistic of men. He ...
— An Introduction to Yoga • Annie Besant
... has just published an article entitled "The End of the World." Our rosy contemporary is far too pessimistic, we feel. Mr. CHURCHILL'S appointment as Minister of the Air has not yet been ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 153, October 31, 1917 • Various
... occur repeated comparisons between man and the beasts; the idea that 'the strain of man's bred out into baboon,' wolf, tiger, fox; the idea that this bestial degradation will end in a furious struggle of all with all, in which the race will perish. The 'pessimistic' strain in Timon suggests to many readers, even more imperatively than King Lear, the notion that Shakespeare was giving vent to some personal feeling, whether present or past; for the signs of his hand appear most unmistakably when ...
— Shakespearean Tragedy - Lectures on Hamlet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth • A. C. Bradley
... the ways. The old gods, who were goodly and glad, had become discredited; the world was no longer young, no longer fresh and fair and hopeful; it had passed through ages of war and misery, it was harassed by doubt, the general feeling was what we would now call pessimistic, and a resigned melancholy, a keen sense of there being something wrong in the universe, can be felt in every line of Virgil, and there are tears in ...
— Great Men and Famous Women, Vol. 7 of 8 • Charles F. (Charles Francis) Horne
... of these pessimistic reflections by the childish glee which many of the convalescents were evincing. Some were Mussulmans, sharpshooters from Algeria and Morocco. In Lourdes, as they might be anywhere, they were interested only in the gifts which the people were showering upon them with patriotic ...
— The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse • Vicente Blasco Ibanez
... 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
... that materialism leaves nothing for man's soul but the husks of swine; who have therefore boldly faced the inevitable alternative between spiritualistic philosophy and hope, and materialism with its pessimistic corollary. That a man may be a materialist or atheist and enjoy life thoroughly, who does not know? but then it is just at the expense of his manhood, because he lives without thought, reflection, or aspiration, i.e., materialistically. Mr. Laing no doubt, as he confesses, has lived pleasantly ...
— The Faith of the Millions (2nd series) • George Tyrrell
... not upset the life of the communities to which they were applied but that they quickened every force and bettered every condition in those communities. But the people of New Jersey could not get them, and there had come upon them a certain pessimistic despair. I used to meet men who shrugged their shoulders and said: "What difference does it make how we vote? Nothing ever results from our votes." The force that is behind the new party that has recently ...
— The New Freedom - A Call For the Emancipation of the Generous Energies of a People • Woodrow Wilson
... if this poor woman had worked at step-cleaning herself for a living, she was so pessimistic about it, and appeared to be so very familiar with the whole subject. People never believe that a fortune is to be made at any business in which they have been ...
— Fan • Henry Harford
... expeditiously. By July 1950, the last month of the Fahy Committee's life, the Army had added only seven more specialties with openings for Negroes to the list of forty published seven months before at the time of its agreement with the committee. In a pessimistic mood, Kenworthy confessed to Judge (p. 378) Fahy[14-144] that "so long as additions are not progressively made to the critical list of MOS in which Negroes can serve, and so long as segregated units continue to be the rule, all MOS and schools can not be ...
— Integration of the Armed Forces, 1940-1965 • Morris J. MacGregor Jr.
... 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 ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... and the thing that will have to happen some day, be the disintegration of 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 ones, is ...
— Expositions of Holy Scripture - Ezekiel, Daniel, and the Minor Prophets. St Matthew Chapters I to VIII • Alexander Maclaren
... a symbol. The more I long for peace, the more I long for that historic smoke. When Louisa's brother or Nora's uncle has a long pessimistic talk with KITCHENER, then I look sadly at my cigar; but when FRENCH and JOFFRE unbend to Vera's stepfather or Beryl's cousin and give him words of cheer, then I take it out and pinch it fondly, and already I see the waiter coming round with ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 147, November 4, 1914 • Various
... 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)
... comparing the Hebrew and Babylonian versions of the problem of knowledge and immortality, one cannot help being struck by the pessimistic tone of the former as against the more consolatory spirit of the latter. God does not want man to attain even knowledge.[1110] He secures it in disobedience to the divine will, whereas Ea willingly grants him the knowledge of all there is in heaven and earth. In this way the Hebrew and ...
— The Religion of Babylonia and Assyria • Morris Jastrow
... of some false step, some sin of which we are paying the penalty. I cannot refrain from recommending the thoughtful reader a popular, but at the same time, profound treatise on this subject by Claudius[1] which exhibits the essentially pessimistic spirit of Christianity. It is entitled: Cursed is ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; Studies in Pessimism • Arthur Schopenhauer
... old folks, too, which most of 'em seems to forget," returned Mrs. Dysart, sending a pessimistic glance after ...
— The Wizard's Daughter and Other Stories • Margaret Collier Graham
... evenings, paying no heed to Frau Nirlanger's timid knocking, or Bennie's good-night message. I uncover my typewriter and set to work at the thing which may or may not be a book, and am extremely wretched and gloomy and pessimistic, after this fashion: ...
— Dawn O'Hara, The Girl Who Laughed • Edna Ferber
... book the strong influence that other minds, Shakespeare notably, have produced upon this mind; here its attitude is never merely pessimistic. It does not criticise them, it has ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... devote the afternoon to writing a long letter to her mother, which had been delayed owing to her recent depression of spirits, for it seemed cruel to write in a pessimistic strain to the happy bride, who now, more than ever, saw everything couleur de rose. Mrs Judge's present had arrived the week before, in the shape of a richly embroidered Indian table-cloth, for which her daughter had as much use as she herself ...
— The Independence of Claire • Mrs. George de Horne Vaizey
... something constructive and optimistic about working with children; that is, if you look at it from my cheerful point of view, and not from our Scotch doctor's. I've never seen anybody like that man; he's always pessimistic and morbid and down. It's best not to be too intelligent about insanity and dipsomania and all the other hereditary details. I am just about ignorant enough to be light-hearted and effective ...
— Dear Enemy • Jean Webster
... the dispiriting which it brings with it. Every sorrow is made darker by the hopelessness with which it is endured. Every care is magnified, and the sweetness of every pleasure is lessened, by this pessimistic tendency. The beauty of the world loses half its charm in the eyes which see all things in the hue of despondent feeling. Slightest fears become terrors, and smallest trials grow into great misfortunes. Our heart makes our world for us; and if the heart be without hope and cheer, ...
— Personal Friendships of Jesus • J. R. Miller
... I spoke so confidently I am afraid that I was not very successful in cheering up my companions in misfortune. This second disappointment was producing its effect upon them; they were becoming depressed and pessimistic; and although they all agreed that the proper thing to do was to hang on to the distant barque, in the hope of eventually attracting the attention of somebody aboard her, I could see that we were all fully convinced that the attempt ...
— Turned Adrift • Harry Collingwood
... us —very wrong. I have turned over these things by myself till I'm tired of arguing them out in my own head, and I want you to come down beforehand, so as to cheer me up a bit with your lighter and brighter philosophy. On the very eve of my marriage, I'm somehow getting dreadfully pessimistic.' ...
— Philistia • Grant Allen
... This pessimistic view, unfortunately, is fully confirmed by the records of cases examined by the Committee. Long terms of imprisonment, though combined with the lash, have proved quite ineffective as a deterrent, even to the individual concerned. In some cases the offender within ...
— Mental Defectives and Sexual Offenders • W. H. Triggs, Donald McGavin, Frederick Truby King, J. Sands Elliot, Ada G. Patterson, C.E. Matthews
... a bit pessimistic, too; but Jack was sure the Dewey would make good on her next try. Bill Witt started to sing: "We'll hang Kaiser Bill to a sour apple tree," but got little response. The torpedo crew were glum over their failure to bag the German ...
— The Brighton Boys with the Submarine Fleet • James R. Driscoll
... judged naive, but mostly at the expense of the universally regretted Baron Stott-Wartenheim. His late Excellency, whom the august favour of his Imperial master had imposed as Ambassador upon several reluctant Ministers of Foreign Affairs, had enjoyed in his lifetime a fame for an owlish, pessimistic gullibility. His Excellency had the social revolution on the brain. He imagined himself to be a diplomatist set apart by a special dispensation to watch the end of diplomacy, and pretty nearly the end of the world, in a horrid democratic upheaval. His prophetic and doleful ...
— The Secret Agent - A Simple Tale • Joseph Conrad
... life comes out like stories very much," responded the pessimistic blacksmith, who, as Rebecca privately thought, had read less than half a dozen books in ...
— New Chronicles of Rebecca • Kate Douglas Wiggin
... upon a 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 ...
— A Survey of Russian Literature, with Selections • Isabel Florence Hapgood
... 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 ...
— British Socialism - An Examination of Its Doctrines, Policy, Aims and Practical Proposals • J. Ellis Barker
... 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)
... of their 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
... plenty as the bowls and bags of bright new pennies meant nothing to him. He knew nothing about war. Very possibly the prophecies of shortage and restrictions and starvation were, in the proof, to be refuted as a thousand other prophecies of the early days, optimistic and pessimistic, were being refuted. What had that to do with it? Remained the frightful facts that were going on out there in Belgium and in Gallipoli and in Russia. Remained the increasing revelation of Germany's enormous might in war and the revelation ...
— If Winter Comes • A.S.M. Hutchinson
... 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 ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... pessimistic humour. He was one of those men who are brave enough on good wine and victuals, but lack the stamina to fight when hungry. He returned presently with the required information. The Plaza de Cadiz was, it appeared, quite close. Indeed, the town of Xeres is ...
— In Kedar's Tents • Henry Seton Merriman
... 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
... need of becoming pessimistic. Above all we should not go back on the history of our Country. We have grown great by assimilation. Let us have a dignified confidence in the power of our institutions and of our Christianity to continue the process which ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... 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 ...
— Brazilian Tales • Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis
... 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 improvement may ...
— Friars and Filipinos - An Abridged Translation of Dr. Jose Rizal's Tagalog Novel, - 'Noli Me Tangere.' • Jose Rizal
... buffeted and perplexed by the cross currents of our time, we should not be pessimistic but should look forward with courage, parting reluctantly with whatever of good the past contained and living hopefully in the present. As Ellis says: "The present is in every age merely the shifting point at which past and future meet, and we can have no quarrel with either. There ...
— A Psychiatric Milestone - Bloomingdale Hospital Centenary, 1821-1921 • Various
... of melancholy is repletion. Need and struggle are what excite and inspire us; our hour of triumph is what brings the void. Not the Jews of the captivity, but those of the days of Solomon's glory are those from whom the pessimistic utterances in our Bible come. Germany, when she lay trampled beneath the hoofs of Bonaparte's troopers, produced perhaps the most optimistic and idealistic literature that the world has seen; and not till the French 'milliards' were distributed ...
— The Will to Believe - and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy • William James
... the speaker with appreciation. On the way north he had learned to know Leslie Branch and to like him, for he had discovered that the man possessed a rare and pleasing peculiarity of disposition. Ordinarily Branch was bitter, irritable, pessimistic; but when his luck was worst and his fortunes lowest he brightened up. It seemed that he reacted naturally, automatically, against misfortune. Certainly his and O'Reilly's plight upon leaving Cuba had been sufficiently unpleasant, for they were almost penniless, and the ...
— Rainbow's End • Rex Beach
... anything to the number of splendid causes which so touch the sympathies these dark days. Perhaps I gave too much before; but I am not a bit sorry, especially now that some of the seed which I cast upon the waters is soon to bear golden fruit for me. I never believe the pessimistic people who say that those who receive charity are never really grateful, and now I know that they are wrong. Jimmy's father has been so appreciative of my pitifully small presents to them, that sometimes he ...
— 'Smiles' - A Rose of the Cumberlands • Eliot H. Robinson
... 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... 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 ...
— The Journal of Negro History, Volume 6, 1921 • Various
... of Wade, too, the fat man's pessimistic expectations were realised; the young man did, early in August, dash out and secure a place on the railroad. Mountain people write few letters. They heard nothing from him after the first message which told them where ...
— Judith of the Cumberlands • Alice MacGowan
... 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 ...
— Aliens • William McFee
... their conversation had not once turned his head or moved towards them. Matravers, conscious that he was not likely to do so, returned to his seat just as the curtain rose upon the last act. The play, grim, pessimistic, yet lifted every now and then to a higher level by strange flashes of genius on the part of the woman, dragged wearily along to an end. The echoes of her last speech died away; she looked at him across the footlights, her dark eyes soft with many regrets, which, consciously or not, ...
— Berenice • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... "You take too pessimistic a view, Jack. This isn't the season of the year for a cruiser to lie off in the Baltic. Winter is coming on. Most of the harbors in Finland will be ice-closed in a month, and there's no shelter hereabouts in a storm. They'll attack; probably open shell ...
— A Rock in the Baltic • Robert Barr
... night in planning in their desert camp. Hiram's frank, open nature tended to breed confidence in the most pessimistic of men; and when he told Filer of the wonderful character of Jerkline Jo and assured him that, despite his past rascality, he would be handsomely rewarded by her, the helpless old man agreed to all that ...
— The She Boss - A Western Story • Arthur Preston Hankins
... thoroughly enjoyed 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 ...
— The Life of Froude • Herbert Paul
... 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 is to ...
— Peter - A Novel of Which He is Not the Hero • F. Hopkinson Smith
... driver unduly pessimistic. Half an hour after Blackie had gone down among boxes and bags the lumbering vehicle thundered into one of the many deep gorges through which the narrow road wound. Here was a sharp turn and a bit of steep grade to take on the run if the stage were to keep ...
— Six Feet Four • Jackson Gregory
... that he had received a private letter from the Philippines, dated April 10th, prior to the arising of any fear of war with the United States, giving pessimistic accounts of the risings there, and passengers arriving by the steamer Leon III. had told similar stories. Now, he declared, the Spanish troops in the Philippines were in a terrible condition, being between two fires, the natives and the Americans. ...
— The Boys of '98 • James Otis
... His mood 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 brought about by the long train of disappointments ...
— The One-Way Trail - A story of the cattle country • Ridgwell Cullum
... obscured, if he has not learned to look upon the far side of the clouds to find that there they glow golden with the rays temporarily shut from him. Because clouds were not interesting to him he never attended to them—and now he cannot. If the pessimistic, morbid one had looked away from the shadow to the sun it hid he, too, in the end might have seen with sane eyes and lived so wholesomely as to find all the good there was in life. Willed ...
— Applied Psychology for Nurses • Mary F. Porter
... 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 ...
— The Antichrist • F. W. Nietzsche
... millionaires for the invention which had been the haunting vision of his uninspiring life. He had not been met with the careless rapture which had been described to him, and he was becoming violently antagonistic to American capital and pessimistic in his views of American institutions. Like Tembarom's father, he ...
— T. Tembarom • Frances Hodgson Burnett
... and in society, in order that those impressions may not exist. If ugliness were to vanish from the world, if universal virtue and felicity were established there, perhaps artists would no longer represent perverse or pessimistic sentiments, but sentiments that are calm, innocent, and joyous, like Arcadians of a real Arcady. But so long as ugliness and turpitude exist in nature and impose themselves on the artist, it is not possible to prevent the expression ...
— Aesthetic as Science of Expression and General Linguistic • Benedetto Croce
... quite conclusively that the negro is not becoming adjusted to the white man's civilization in many cases in spite of considerable efforts which are being put forth in his behalf. While we are very far from taking a pessimistic view toward this or any other social problem, we believe that most of the solutions that have thus far been tried or urged are failures, and that more radical methods need to be adopted if the negro becomes a useful social and industrial ...
— Sociology and Modern Social Problems • Charles A. Ellwood
... of mental and physical illnesses in the material bodies and assured a prolongation of the life of each body, which was important in itself, for this trip had proven to be a lot longer than even the most pessimistic had anticipated. ...
— Has Anyone Here Seen Kelly? • Bryce Walton
... The Nation noticed distinctly that, from 1895 on, its tone became more pessimistic and its criticism was marked by greater acerbity. Mr. Rollo Ogden in his biography shows that Godkin's feeling of disappointment over the progress of the democratic experiment in America, and his hopelessness of our future, began ...
— Historical Essays • James Ford Rhodes
... not wish to seem, even, to be cynical or pessimistic, but when I look at some of the mental pabulum that our newspapers supply, I cannot but feel that we are making vast efforts to maintain the commonplace and ...
— Quit Your Worrying! • George Wharton James
... him into the storeroom, but remained near the open doorway in a concave and pessimistic attitude. Penrod felt in a dark corner of the box and laid hands upon a simple apparatus consisting of an old bushel-basket with a few yards of clothes-line tied to each of its handles. He passed the ends ...
— Penrod • Booth Tarkington
... 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 ...
— Mr. Justice Raffles • E. W. Hornung
... austere pleasures of the mind. Carlyle, as steward, undertakes the working department and eulogises a life of labour in the fields. Omar Khayyam is established in the cellar and swears that it is the only room in the house. Even the blackest of pessimistic artists enjoys his art. At the precise moment that he has written some shameless and terrible indictment of Creation, his one pang of joy in the achievement joins the universal chorus of gratitude, with the scent of the wild flower and ...
— Twelve Types • G.K. Chesterton
... Carminow turned a pessimistic eye on Ishmael. "Are you still pure?" he shot at him in his deepest bass. "I see you are; your look answers for you." And he strode on again. He turned to add over his shoulder: "I cannot in the intewests of ...
— Secret Bread • F. Tennyson Jesse
... folly of having a half-dozen competing lines, running side by side through the same territory, will be fully demonstrated. With this demonstration, will come the opportunity, to scores of paid press writers, pessimistic bigots, self-conceited, unprogressive wiseacres, who have so long and so loudly derided the government ownership of railroads, as the most suicidal and unbusiness like scheme ever hatched; to answer this pertinent question: Would it be possible, for government engineers building public railroads, ...
— Solaris Farm - A Story of the Twentieth Century • Milan C. Edson
... 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, running ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... through the endless life of children's children. Seeking counsels of our own souls' perfection, we have despised and rejected the possible increasing perfection of unending generations. Or if we are thrown back in pessimistic despair from making living folk decent, we leap to idle speculations of a thousand years hereafter instead of working steadily and persistently for ...
— Darkwater - Voices From Within The Veil • W. E. B. Du Bois
... him if he were as pessimistic as his writings would indicate, and he replied that it wasn't safe to judge a man's thoughts by his writings. His writings showed only what kind of things he liked to describe. "Some authors become vocal before one aspect of life, ...
— The Crow's Nest • Clarence Day, Jr.
... think you'd be a leetle mite anxious," said the Captain, who was in somewhat of a pessimistic mood that day. "They can't all be equally good. You remember ...
— Mary Ware's Promised Land • Annie Fellows Johnston
... 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 ...
— Old Familiar Faces • Theodore Watts-Dunton
... sottish unconsciousness. He sleeps a drugged sleep, and, if he dream, his dreams are dim and inarticulate. But to the imaginative man, John Barleycorn sends the pitiless, spectral syllogisms of the white logic. He looks upon life and all its affairs with the jaundiced eye of a pessimistic German philosopher. He sees through all illusions. He transvalues all values. Good is bad, truth is a cheat, and life is a joke. From his calm-mad heights, with the certitude of a god, he beholds all life as evil. Wife, ...
— John Barleycorn • Jack London
... final conquest by the arms of Rome. No one can fail to be struck by the marked difference between the period from Marathon to the Peloponnesian War and the period from Alexander to Mummius. Philosophy also suffered, and became deeply pessimistic even in the hands of its best and noblest exponents. 'Absence of feeling,' 'absence of care'—such were the highest goals of ...
— Birth Control • Halliday G. Sutherland
... 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 ...
— Her Father's Daughter • Gene Stratton-Porter
... profoundly discouraged and pessimistic. All his energy had left him. London had become hard, hostile, cruel, impossible. He longed for Leek with ...
— Buried Alive: A Tale of These Days • Arnold Bennett
... 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. An intensified ...
— The Contemporary Review, January 1883 - Vol 43, No. 1 • Various
... 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
... of art are inextricably bound up with the laws of life, that an aesthetic dogma may therefore promote or depress all vital force, and that a picture, a symphony, a poem or a statue, is just as capable of being pessimistic, anarchic, Christian or revolutionary, as a philosophy or a science is. To speak of a certain class of music as being compatible with the decline of culture, therefore, was to Nietzsche a perfectly warrantable association of ideas, and that is ...
— The Case Of Wagner, Nietzsche Contra Wagner, and Selected Aphorisms. • Friedrich Nietzsche.
... ever and anon he would utter some pessimistic word, or presage dire disaster, or remind Casey that his scalp was destined to dry in a Sioux's lodge, or call on Shane to hit something to save his life, or declare the engine was off the track. He ...
— The U.P. Trail • Zane Grey
... is a melancholy one. The narrow life, with its isolation and its hardships, makes him pessimistic and brooding, though endowed with the keen instinct and peculiar humor of those who are far removed from the artificialities of life. But Mr. Black ascribes this temperament, not to race or hardship or isolation, but to the ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 5 • Various
... construction. I use the word 'artificial' in its more artistic sense, as opposed to the so-called natural school. His subjects of course were national, and not French. Whether his pessimism was national or personal, I have not been able to discover. It seemed to me that he was a pessimistic man dealing with a nation inclined to pessimism, but that had nothing to do with the technical qualities of the man any more than the national peculiarities of Denmark had to do with Thorvaldsen as a follower ...
— Shenandoah - Representative Plays by American Dramatists: 1856-1911 • Bronson Howard
... 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 ...
— Lorraine - A romance • Robert W. Chambers
... Heaven with a gesture at once pious and pessimistic—"is to pay me fourteen dollars back rent ...
— From a Bench in Our Square • Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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. ...
— Casa Braccio, Volumes 1 and 2 (of 2) • F. Marion Crawford
... of the sixteenth epode by Horace—soon after the second, it would seem—gave Vergil an opportunity to recognize the new poet, and answer his pessimistic appeal with the cheerful prophecy of the fourth Eclogue, as we have seen. By this time we may suppose that an intimate friendship had sprung up between the two poets, strengthened of course by friendly intercourse, now that ...
— Vergil - A Biography • Tenney Frank
... Uncle Jim and Charley promptly annexed the slight overhang of the cliff whence the deer had jumped. It was dry at the moment, but we uttered pessimistic predictions if the wind should change. Tom Rich and Jim Lester had a little tent, and insisted ...
— Arizona Nights • Stewart Edward White
... a tall, lean, black-haired man, with a sallow complexion and vinegar aspect—evidently one of those unhappy mortals who are intended by Nature to take a pessimistic view of all things, and to point out to their fellows the deep shadows of human life. I was not at all surprised, therefore, when he replied in a deep, decided tone, "Bad, ...
— Russia • Donald Mackenzie Wallace
... physical suspense, if she did. His ravishment had suffered a sharp natural decline reflected in a mental gloom. For the moment he desired nothing, valued nothing. And, in this mood, he became talkative; he poured a storm of pessimistic observation over Savina; and she listened with a rapt, transported, attention. It stopped as suddenly as it had begun, in a silence coincident with dusk. The room slowly lost its sombre color and the sense of the confining walls; it became grey and apparently limitless; as monotonous, Lee Randon ...
— Cytherea • Joseph Hergesheimer
... squall furiously beset the ship. Soon the 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 a picture ...
— The Mystery • Stewart Edward White and Samuel Hopkins Adams
... 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 Abbey. I owe him grateful thanks ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... together with assault, or an attempt at assault, would not be easily set right. It required a diplomatic miracle. The slightest lack of self-possession on the part of the seconds is equivalent to a catastrophe. As happens in such circumstances, events are hurried, and the pessimistic anticipations of the irritable Marquis were verified almost as soon as he uttered them. Dorsenne and he had barely left the Palais Savorelli when Gorka arrived. The energy with which he repulsed the ...
— Serge Panine • Georges Ohnet
... Revolution by the various political clubs, is matter of history. The earliest of these associations, of course, bore a general resemblance to the social institutions which the Parisians now know as Cercles; and it may be remarked that one of the most celebrated of the many recent pessimistic publications of the day, the Grandeur et Decadence des Francais, by M. Gaston Routier, finds one of the many signs of the social demoralization of his countrymen in the number and importance of the cercles in the cities, and especially in the high play that ...
— Paris from the Earliest Period to the Present Day; Volume 1 • William Walton
... 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
... along the dining table amongst glasses, knives and forks. It was the longest day Marcella had ever known; as the swift twilight passed, the passengers came aboard damp and damped; most of them were grumbling; all looked thoroughly pessimistic about Australia. The schoolmaster was one of the first to come solemnly along the deck under an umbrella. He had avoided Marcella rather pointedly lately, but he came and talked quite affably for a while, didactically contrasting Melbourne ...
— Captivity • M. Leonora Eyles
... the main structure has as its central figure Vanity with her hand-glass. Whether the artist intended it as a pessimistic commentary on all human life, or not, his series of episodes on earth begins and ends with the figure of Vanity. Reading to the left on this same panel one sees a man and a woman starting the journey of life on earth, apparently ...
— An Art-Lovers guide to the Exposition • Shelden Cheney
... Having finished their summer work on Ten Mile Creek, 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
... skill, beating his boy, roaring songs when his vessel lay in the Pool, and lamenting the good times gone by. When at last his joints grew too stiff, and other troubles of age came upon him, he settled ashore in some little cottage and devoted himself to quiet meditation of a pessimistic kind. Every morning he rolled down to the quay and criticised with cruel acuteness the habits of the younger generation of mariners; every evening he took his place in the tavern parlour and instructed the assembled ...
— The Romance of the Coast • James Runciman
... 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. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... were not going to mend sufficiently within any reasonable time to let him return to the fighting line, where, at the moment of his wound, he was doing divisional staff work, and was in the way of early promotion. He was a man of clear and vigorous mind, inclined always to take a pessimistic view of himself and his surroundings, and very critical also of persons in authority; a scientific soldier, besides, indulging a strong natural contempt for the politicians and all their crew, only surpassed by a similar scorn of newspapers and the press. He had never been popular as a subaltern, ...
— Missing • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... proud confidence in human power with which Aristotle offers to man his will and character formation as his own work, the emphasis with which he has opposed to the quietistic 'velle non discitur' (we cannot educate volition nor learn to will, as later pessimistic opinions have expressed it axiomatically) with the real indispensability and at the same time the possibility of the formation of the will; this contention is admirable and quite characteristic of the methods of thought of ancient philosophy at its height." (Jodl., ...
— Hidden Symbolism of Alchemy and the Occult Arts • Herbert Silberer
... 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 he had enough original elemental ideas to have supplied a dozen ...
— Memories of Jane Cunningham Croly, "Jenny June" • Various
... he acknowledged. "That's what I need now and then. Perhaps I get a pessimistic view when I'm trying ...
— Desert Conquest - or, Precious Waters • A. M. Chisholm
... not know precisely whether these last words, which are slightly pessimistic, are those of the good Diderot himself. But they are those of a Parisian of 1892, who has been able to forget his cares and annoyances in reading the story that you ...
— Zibeline, Complete • Phillipe de Massa
... 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 ...
— The Birth of Yugoslavia, Volume 2 • Henry Baerlein
... 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 understood; but it is not unusual for patients to bring to the doctor's attention many complaints that would pass unnoticed if they taught themselves to restrain the imagination, to refrain from pessimistic reflections, and to divert their thoughts from themselves to ...
— The Prospective Mother - A Handbook for Women During Pregnancy • J. Morris Slemons
... bold metaphysical thinker, born in Danzig, of Dutch descent; was early dissatisfied with life, and conceived pessimistic views of it; in 1814 jotted down in a note-book, "Inward discord is the very bane of human nature so long as a man lives," and on this fact he brooded for years; at length the problem solved itself, and the solution appears in his great work, ...
— The Nuttall Encyclopaedia - Being a Concise and Comprehensive Dictionary of General Knowledge • Edited by Rev. James Wood
... powerful, but never morbid; tragic, if you like, but not without hope. We need not aspire too much; but we will not look at the stones in the road all the time. And the dunghills, in which those weird fowl, the pessimistic realists, love to rake, we will sedulously avoid. Cheer up, old fellow, and be thankful that you ...
— The Collaborators - 1896 • Robert S. Hichens
... slight must be the attractions of Church—his Church at least—to a large proportion even of those who do now attend? Rivalry between Museum and Gin-palace one can contemplate hopefully. But if the real rivalry is to be between Museum and Church, with such results as this rather pessimistic parson predicts, the look-out seems rather dismal—for the Church! Surely this is the highest compliment to secular attractions ever paid by a cleric! Mr. Punch hopes—and believes—it is as ill-deserved ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 104, April 29, 1893 • Various
... merchants and friends in St. John's did their best to make it a red-letter day. Sir Edward Morris, the Prime Minister, and other politicians, the Mayor and civic functionaries were all good enough to come and add their quota to the launching of the new ship. There were still pessimistic and croaking individuals, however, as well as joyful hearts, when a few days later we again ...
— A Labrador Doctor - The Autobiography of Wilfred Thomason Grenfell • Wilfred Thomason Grenfell
... 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 ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... time her baby was eighteen months old, she had finished it. It was blankly pessimistic, of course. Blank pessimism is the one creed possible for all save fools. To hold any other is to curl yourself up selfishly in your own easy chair, and say to your soul, "O soul, eat and drink; O soul, make merry. Carouse thy fill. Ignore the maimed lives, ...
— The Woman Who Did • Grant Allen |
