"Optimist" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... After a little 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 ...
— Gallipoli Diary, Volume 2 • Ian Hamilton
... STOUGHTON), and illustrates her theme with the case of a young man 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 Arthur and a cooing dove had proposed ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 156, June 18, 1919 • Various
... 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 wicked does ...
— The Life and Letters of Thomas Henry Huxley Volume 1 • Leonard Huxley
... it matters little whether it is done by a book or a sword, by a clumsy battle-axe or a chemical bomb. The case is the same with ideas. The pessimist may be a proud figure when he curses all the stars; the optimist may be an even prouder figure when he blesses them all. But the real test is not in the energy, but in the effect. When the optimist has said, "All things are interesting," we are left free; we can be interested as much or as little as we please. But when the pessimist says, "No things are interesting," ...
— Alarms and Discursions • G. K. Chesterton
... came the earthquake at Lisbon. This frightful disaster became an immense interrogation. The optimist was compelled to ask, "What was my God doing? Why did the Universal Father crush to shapelessness thousands of his poor children, even at the moment when they were upon their knees returning thanks to Him?" What could be done with this horror? If earthquake there must ...
— Lectures of Col. R. G. Ingersoll - Latest • Robert Green Ingersoll
... me a thorough-going optimist? Scarcely, for the willow cannot become the oak, Your old name for me was 'The Idealist,' and I suppose in a measure I deserved it; I know I did in the most foolish sense of the word. And in my idealism was of course implied a good deal of optimism. But shall I tell you what ...
— Thyrza • George Gissing
... the moral and religious movements that have occurred within my memory—in several of which I have taken part—and I shall note also the changes for better or worse that I have observed. If as an optimist I may sometimes exaggerate the good, and minimize the evil things, it is the curse of a pessimist that he can travel from Dan to Beersheba and find ...
— Recollections of a Long Life - An Autobiography • Theodore Ledyard Cuyler
... the "Long House" by pick and plough and scraper, and the mastery of the currents of the Mississippi by the paddle wheel, the vast plains beyond seemed smaller and the Rockies less formidable. Men now looked forward confidently, with an optimist of these days, to the time "when circulation and association between the Atlantic and Pacific and the Mexican Gulf shall be as free and perfect as they are at this moment in England" between the extremities of that country. The vision of ...
— The Paths of Inland Commerce - A Chronicle of Trail, Road, and Waterway, Volume 21 in The - Chronicles of America Series • Archer B. Hulbert
... given most attention to the advances of psychology during the past two decades are confident that by the proper application of psychology the efficiency of men is to be increased beyond the idle dream of the optimist of the past. Since by a study of habits the efficiency of men in fundamental occupations has been increased from forty to four hundred per cent, it is hard to prophesy what results are to be secured ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... to be reckoned with; and if a pursuer should follow him under the rock his only chance would lie in getting hold, after a fight, of the man's loaded revolver or ammunition-belt. Such a hope involved a great deal of confidence, but de Spain was an optimist—most ...
— Nan of Music Mountain • Frank H. Spearman
... comptroller-general, Herault de Sechelles, as well as the king and Madame de Pompadour, then and for a long while the reigning favorite, gave so favorable a reception to the hero of India that Dupleix, always an optimist, conceived fresh hopes. "I shall regain my property here," he would say, "and India will recover in ...
— A Popular History of France From The Earliest Times - Volume VI. of VI. • Francois Pierre Guillaume Guizot
... 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 spirit of opposition,— ...
— The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. II, No. 8, June 1858 • Various
... "You're an optimist, Ling," he said. "No, I don't think they'll call me in for a murder. They don't call in ...
— The Daffodil Mystery • Edgar Wallace
... a great Pole's philosophy receiving flagellation at the hands of our incorrigible optimist. ("If he could understand," exclaimed Keredec, "that the individual must be immortal before it is born, ha! then this babbler might have writted some intelligence!") On the surface everything was as usual with our trio, with nothing to show any turbulence of under-currents, unless it was ...
— The Guest of Quesnay • Booth Tarkington
... 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. I have to get ...
— Poor Man's Rock • Bertrand W. Sinclair
... faith it is one of the mighty levers of society. Men of hope are the saviours of the world. In days of persecution and doubt it is their courage which rallies the wavering hosts and gives others {198} heart for the struggle. Every Christian is an optimist not with the reckless assurance that calls evil good, but with the rational faith, begotten of experience, that good is yet to be the final goal of ill. 'Thy kingdom come' is the prayer of faith and hope, and the missionary ...
— Christianity and Ethics - A Handbook of Christian Ethics • Archibald B. C. Alexander
... 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 ...
— U.S. Presidential Inaugural Addresses • Various
... table with two or four guests discussing the official communiques of the day, the flow of talk assisted by a bottle of red or white wine. M.X., the miller, at heart more or less of a pessimist invariably got into an argument with that fierce optimist, M.Y., the lumberman. Night after night they would argue as to the progress of the war; whether Germany was really short of food; whether there were really three million men in "Keetchenaire's" army; whether the country was infested with spies; or why Von Kluck's ...
— On the Fringe of the Great Fight • George G. Nasmith
... saddest overcoated optimist it is a plague—a corroding plague that Pharaoh successfully side-stepped. It beneficently covers the wheat fields, swelling the crop—and the Flour Trust gets us by the throat like a sudden quinsy. ...
— Waifs and Strays - Part 1 • O. Henry
... the bright side of things is called an optimist, and one who looks on the dull side ...
— Children's Rhymes, Children's Games, Children's Songs, Children's Stories - A Book for Bairns and Big Folk • Robert Ford
... the attempt 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 precipitated old age ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Carnegie • Andrew Carnegie
... laborer was of a cheerful disposition that naturally inclined to seek out the good in every situation. He was a genuine optimist. Thus, after tramping the three miles from home to begin the day's work on the ditch, he discovered that he had been careless, and explained ...
— Jokes For All Occasions - Selected and Edited by One of America's Foremost Public Speakers • Anonymous
... the optimist; "but 'twere not a proper sort of dream nawther. I've thowt a vast about it off an' on, an' I reckon 'twere a dream wi' a meanin' tul it. 'Twere like Pharaoh's dream o' t' fat an' lean beasts. Happen one day ...
— More Tales of the Ridings • Frederic Moorman
... who had experienced the favours of fortune and was an Optimist, met a man who had experienced an optimist and was a Cynic. So the Cynic turned out of the road to let the Optimist roll by ...
— Fantastic Fables • Ambrose Bierce
... blind 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 to more ...
— The Marrow of Tradition • Charles W. Chesnutt
... an appalling philosophy that sounds! To attempt to classify you, Mrs. Cheveley, would be an impertinence. But may I ask, at heart, are you an optimist or a pessimist? Those seem to be the only two fashionable religions ...
— An Ideal Husband - A Play • Oscar Wilde
... kingdom of which the small boy is a subject remains what it always was. Nature, who is a well-meaning blunderer, has tried to set things right, first by planting some natural affection for his small boy into the stony heart of the parent, and, second, by making the small boy himself an optimist. Happily, there is always a silver lining to the cloud that hovers over the small boy, even when the cane is descending upon him. Trifles please the poor little fellow and help him to forget the gloom which surrounds him. Coventry Patmore, ...
— The Idler Magazine, Volume III, March 1893 - An Illustrated Monthly • Various
... these divines see, that it shews much less indignity to God, to assert that he has done his best in producing this world, than to say, that, being able to produce a better, he has had malice enough to produce a very bad one? If the Optimist, by his system, detracts from the divine power, the theologian, who treats him as a blasphemer, is himself a blasphemer, who offends the goodness of God in espousing the cause ...
— Good Sense - 1772 • Paul Henri Thiry, Baron D'Holbach
... resourceful: he speaks French fluently and he was familiar with the foreign trade field. With the outbreak of war he did not lose his head and try to get business indiscriminately. Instead, he made a careful survey of the field; he did not listen to the optimist who said it would be a short war: his instinct told him, on the contrary, that it would be a long one. "What will France need more than anything else?" ...
— The War After the War • Isaac Frederick Marcosson
... an 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 on man's own faith, ...
— Epilepsy, Hysteria, and Neurasthenia • Isaac G. Briggs
... good humour because he was to be appointed manager of the establishment; these two young men (who were cousins) were also in good humour because of the success of the French cars. Villona was in good humour because he had had a very satisfactory luncheon; and besides he was an optimist by nature. The fourth member of the party, however, was too excited ...
— Dubliners • James Joyce
... 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 ...
— The Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 1995, Memorial Issue • Various
... referred to his infirmity, and then perforce, as an excuse for some trouble he put me to, and so slightly worded that I paid no heed. This is a good measure of his courage under sufferings of which none but the untried will think lightly. And I think it worth noting 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 ...
— The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson, Volume 9 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... sympathetic interest. But for all he knew life in the raw and the gloom of the spruce forest, his outlook had not been darkened. For all his long acquaintance with a stark and remorseless Nature, he remained an optimist. ...
— The Snowshoe Trail • Edison Marshall
... tak' a closer look at us," suggested an optimist in the rear rank. "He micht walk ...
— The First Hundred Thousand • Ian Hay
... bankruptcy, and so keep him out of the Poor Debtor's Court by doling out support from day to day. Confidence is the only thing that keeps matters going; what happens when this is lost is now being demonstrated in many parts of Europe. The optimist claims that increased production, coupled with enforced economy, will produce a satisfactory solution, but there is no evidence that labour, now having the whip-hand, will give up its present advantage sufficiently ...
— Towards the Great Peace • Ralph Adams Cram
... the needs of this readjustment period, the volunteer should be an optimist, and should exercise common sense in guiding the adult over the first lap of the unfamiliar road. I have advised the volunteers who are now in France, and those preparing to go there, to take writing boards, games, bright, pithy stories, and a lot of nonsense verse. I have told ...
— Five Lectures on Blindness • Kate M. Foley
... convinced that the world is a bad place, the optimist is sure that it can be good. That is the point of the book. Chesterton has his own ideas of what is wrong, and he ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... political and literary work a contempt for compromise of every kind, which occasionally leads her into untenable positions and exaggerations. Like her friend George Sand, she has ever been an inveterate optimist and in the clouds, and this defect of her very qualities has tended to make her proficient in the gentle art of making enemies. Thus she broke with Anatole France for espousing the cause of Dreyfus, because, in spite of her keen sense of justice, she identified the Army with France and ...
— The Schemes of the Kaiser • Juliette Adam
... Raymond thought that in this case her bonte might have gone a little further. At any rate this was the only allusion that she made to his bothers and worries. Indeed, she always passed over such things lightly; she was an optimist for others as well as for herself, which doubtless had a great deal to do (Raymond indulged in the reflection) with the headway she made in a society tired of its ...
— A London Life; The Patagonia; The Liar; Mrs. Temperly • Henry James
... restlessness, the same intellectual despondency. Now, who is it that can view these perturbations of the world with a tranquil and rational hope? I answer, that it is only he who views his own time in the light of the eternal purposes of God. The religious man is bound to be an optimist, not with the foolish optimism which blinks the facts of life; but with the ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... which the vanished splendour of the mountains 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 strenuous work, with no time to himself; and it had suddenly been borne ...
— Delia Blanchflower • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... 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
... of this city, and he could not therefore be much in want of society. With so many supposed comforts around him—with so many visions of wealth and splendour—one thing alone disturbed the peace of the poor optimist, and would indeed have confounded most bons vivants. "He was curious," he said, "in his table, choice in his selection of cooks, had every day a dinner of three regular courses and a dessert; and ...
— Letters On Demonology And Witchcraft • Sir Walter Scott
... demand news from some passer-by whose sleeve was 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 ...
— On the Firing Line • Anna Chapin Ray and Hamilton Brock Fuller
... 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 ...
— Rattlin the Reefer • Edward Howard
... 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? ...
— The Power and the Glory • Grace MacGowan Cooke
... such thing," she retorted hotly. "A pessimist's a man that sees nothin' but the bad, and says there's no help for it and won't raise a hand: he's a proper sour-belly. An optimist's a man that sees nothin' but the good, and says everything's all right; let's have a good time. Poor fool! The practical man—anyway, the practical woman—sees both the bad and the good, and says we can make ...
— Hepsey Burke • Frank Noyes Westcott
... identity of "might and right" never leads, with him, to its worst consequence, a fatalistic or indolent repose; the withdrawal from the world's affairs of the soul "holding no form of creed but contemplating all." That he was neither a consistent optimist nor a consistent pessimist is apparent from his faith in man's partial ability to mould his fate. Not "belief, belief," but "action, action," is his working motto. On the title-page of the Latter-Day Pamphlets he quotes from ...
— Thomas Carlyle - Biography • John Nichol
... years—its climate, its situation, its scenery, its water power, its lake-shore lands as prospective sites for mansion summer cottages, and the treasures of its unopened quarries. So incorrigible an optimist was Milton Caukins that any slight degree of success, which might attend the promotion of any one of his numerous schemes, caused an elation that amounted to hilarity. On the other hand, the deadly blight of non-fulfilment, that annually attacked his most cherished hopes for the future development ...
— Flamsted quarries • Mary E. Waller
... yellow tuft on his chin. What could they be, then? Not summer boarders. It was only early spring; and, besides, although the little German was an optimist, even he could not imagine any one selecting a Dakota prairie for an outing. Yet ... No, they could ...
— A Breath of Prairie and other stories • Will Lillibridge
... her look dwelt on Laura, she was conscious of certain guilty reserves and concealments in her own breast. She wished Hubert had more sense—she hoped to goodness it would all go off nicely! But of course it would. Polly was an optimist and took all things simply. Her anxieties for Laura did not long resist the mere pleasure of the journey and the trip, the flatteries of expectation. What a very respectable and, on the whole, good-looking young man was Mr. Seaton! ...
— Helbeck of Bannisdale, Vol. I. • Mrs. Humphry Ward
... old-fashioned notions with respect to women, rather singular in so young a man,—for he was only thirty; he preferred to believe in their goodness, in spite of any amount of demonstration to the contrary; it vexed him to be reminded of the shortcomings of his friends; by nature he was an optimist, and had a large amount of faith in people's good intentions. 'He meant well, poor fellow, in spite of his failures,' was a speech I have heard more than once from his lips. He was always ready to condone a fault or heal a breach; indeed, his sweet ...
— Uncle Max • Rosa Nouchette Carey
... naturally an 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 them one feels that he ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... which he accomplished, the 'Essay on Man,' aims, like 'Paradise Lost,' to 'vindicate the ways of God to man,' but as regards logic chiefly demonstrates the author's inability to reason. He derived the ideas, in fragmentary fashion, from Bolingbroke, who was an amateur Deist and optimist of the shallow eighteenth century type, and so far was Pope from understanding what he was doing that he was greatly disturbed when it was pointed out to him that the theology of the poem was Deistic rather than Christian ...
— A History of English Literature • Robert Huntington Fletcher
... that had been earned by his ferries and railways the day before. This was for the weakest spot in the financial dike. And with one bank president after another similar scenes were enacted. They were paralyzed with fear, and first of all he played his role of the big vital optimist. Times were improving. ...
— Burning Daylight • Jack London
... nothing," said Ronicky. He was a professional optimist. "We had a picture of a girl, and we knew she was on a certain train bound East, three or four weeks ago. That's all we knew. Now we know her name is Caroline Smith, and that she lives where she can see ...
— Ronicky Doone • Max Brand
... optimist Lord PEEL commended the Ministry of Mines Bill as being calculated to restore harmony and goodwill among masters and men. According to Lord GAINFORD the best way to secure this result is to hand back the control of the mines to their owners, between whom and the employes, ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, August 11, 1920 • Various
... paid it in advance. It's the wages of adventure, and the wide world knows the feel Of the stuff that stirs good huntsmen all and brings the hounds to heel! It's the one reward that's gratis and precedes the toilsome task— It's the one thing always better than an optimist can ask! It's amusing, it's amazing, and it's never twice the same; It's the salt of true adventure and ...
— The Ivory Trail • Talbot Mundy
... fashion by the stove and talked of public affairs, especially the stage into which the war had now come. The heat of the room felt grateful, as a winter night was falling outside, and in the society of his friends Prescott found himself becoming more of an optimist than he had been for some days. Cheerfulness is riveted in such a physical base as youth and strength, and Prescott was no exception. He could even smile behind his hand when he saw General Wood draw forth the infallible bowie-knife, pull a piece of ...
— Before the Dawn - A Story of the Fall of Richmond • Joseph Alexander Altsheler
... same magazine, in an article reprinted in the same booklet, Mrs. Belloc Lowndes, that excellent weaver of mystery stories and sister of Hilaire Belloc, said: "Before all things Hugh Walpole is an optimist, with a great love for and a great belief in human nature. His outlook is essentially sane, essentially normal. He has had his reverses and difficulties, living in lodgings in remote Chelsea, depending entirely upon his own efforts. Tall and strongly built, clean-shaven, ...
— When Winter Comes to Main Street • Grant Martin Overton
... massacre. They believed the war would go on until living humanity on all sides revolted from the unceasing sacrifice. In the autumn of 1918, when at last the end came in sight, by German defeat, unexpected a few months before even by the greatest optimist in the British armies, the German soldiers were glad. They did not care how the war ended so long as it ended. Defeat? What did that matter? Was it worse to be defeated than for the race to ...
— Now It Can Be Told • Philip Gibbs
... 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; ...
— The Three Musketeers • Alexandre Dumas, Pere
... of kindness and mock at words of affection. I know this though I have seen but little of the world. I suppose I have something harsher in my nature than you have, something which every now and then tells me dreary secrets about my race, and I cannot believe the voice of the Optimist, charm he never so wisely. On the other hand, I feel forced to listen when a Thackeray speaks. I know truth is delivering her oracles ...
— Charlotte Bronte and Her Circle • Clement K. Shorter
... 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 ...
— Mr. Faust • Arthur Davison Ficke
... is 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 in ...
— The Pirate of Panama - A Tale of the Fight for Buried Treasure • William MacLeod Raine
... and loses all, is a favourite with Browning. He repeats it frequently under diverse circumstances, for it opened out so many various endings, and afforded so much opportunity for his beloved analysis. Moreover, optimist as he was in his final thought of man, he was deeply conscious of the ironies of life, of the ease with which things go wrong, of the impossibility of setting them right from without. And in the matter of love he marks in ...
— The Poetry Of Robert Browning • Stopford A. Brooke
... intellectual, in which his creatures move is searching and disturbing. But, I ask myself, are people really like that? Or rather are there enough of these unnaturals, extremists, moral Bolshevists or whatever you like to call them, to justify their presentation as a modern type? Always an optimist, I think not; and I notice that the author gives a no less clever and a much more convincing impression of the normal, settled and pleasant characters who are incidental to the plot. Make for yourself the acquaintance of the charming Wilfred Vail and the most amusing ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Vol. 159, September 1st, 1920 • Various
... Captain, who was an optimist—he even applied that theory to human nature—"I suppose it is all right now. Everybody knows now that you are ...
— From One Generation to Another • Henry Seton Merriman
... Austria were outnumbered by at least three to one. But on this particular morning, people were too stunned for calculations. The incredible had happened. The long-discussed war—the nightmare of the nervous, the derision of the optimist—had actually materialised. The happy-go-luck years of peace and plenty had suddenly come to an end. Black tragedy leaned ...
— The Great Impersonation • E. Phillips Oppenheim
... ardor of the fighting optimist. He was one who "doubted clouds would break," who dreamed, since "right was worsted, wrong would triumph." With Robert Browning he had but this one thing in common, that both were fighters, both "held we fall to rise, are baffled to fight better," ...
— Henrik Ibsen • Edmund Gosse
... the woman 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. The French ...
— What's Wrong With The World • G.K. Chesterton
... the optimist, the pessimist, and the vacillating man, from the designing and manufacturing point of view of a machine business, applies with equal ...
— Industrial Progress and Human Economics • James Hartness
... Pete was no optimist. Besides, inquiries concerning the health of cow- punchers were not only superfluous, but bordered on flaccidity. It was not like the boss to ...
— Heart of the West • O. Henry
... fain to believe that in some phantom world all will be given back to us, and that our toys have only been laid by in the nursery upstairs. Who, indeed, can deny that to give up these dreams involves a cruel pang? But, then, who but the most determined optimist can deny that a cruel pang is inevitable? Is not the promise too shadowy to give us real satisfaction? The whole lesson of our lives is summed up in teaching us to say "never" without needless flinching, or, ...
— Prose Masterpieces from Modern Essayists • James Anthony Froude, Edward A. Freeman, William Ewart Gladstone, John Henry Newman and Leslie Steph
... Protestant mysticism is an endeavour to mitigate the gloom which hangs over the future state.'[563] This is very strongly marked in all the later productions of Law's mind. He was very far from taking anything like an optimist view of the world around him. There is no writer of his age who shows himself more impressed with an abhorrence of sin, and with the sense of its widespread and deeply rooted influences. He is austere even to excess ...
— The English Church in the Eighteenth Century • Charles J. Abbey and John H. Overton
... almost too much of an optimist. Couldn't you be serious for just a minute? You know, I feel quite well acquainted with you—and the others, of course. But they are different. And they are 'permanences' with Nadine. That's the kind of thing they're fit for. I don't worry about them, and I shan't ...
— Winnie Childs - The Shop Girl • C. N. Williamson
... an optimist,"—said Maryllia, kissing her—"and you're very young! I have learned that in this best of all possible worlds, human nature is often the worst part of all creation, and that when you want to avoid a particularly objectionable human being, that being is always round the corner. ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... justify the conclusion that the upper grades of skilled labour have made considerable advances, and that the lower grades of regular unskilled labourers have to a less degree shared in this advance, they do not warrant the optimist conclusion often drawn from them, that poverty is a disease which left alone will cure itself, and which, in point of fact, is curing itself rapidly. Before we consent to accept the evidence of improvement in the average condition of the labouring classes during the last half century ...
— Problems of Poverty • John A. Hobson
... "You're a heavenly 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 dull thud's ...
— Bert Wilson on the Gridiron • J. W. Duffield
... to do?" He began to produce his knowledge of the world for her benefit, jerkily and allusively, and with a strong, rank flavor of "savoir faire." He took an optimist view of her chances. Ann Veronica listened thoughtfully, with her eyes on the turf, and now and then she asked a question or looked up to discuss a point. In the meanwhile, as he talked, he scrutinized ...
— Ann Veronica • H. G. Wells
... optimist in relation to the eventual uprooting of the greater number of components of the anti-social feeling of jealousy. And when woman reaches economic independence, then another component of the instinct of jealousy—the terror at losing a provider and ...
— Woman - Her Sex and Love Life • William J. Robinson
... 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 equipped ...
— New York Times Current History; The European War, Vol 2, No. 3, June, 1915 - April-September, 1915 • Various
... foretells the dawn of a millennium. And history affords no presumption in favour of the prophet who prophesies smooth things. The prognostics of a pessimist may be as much belied by the event as the hopes of an optimist. But for one prophet to decry the predictions of another simply as prophecies is a downright absurdity. Even among rival soothsayers some regard must be had to fairness and common sense; when Zedekiah, the son of Chenaanah, ...
— A Leap in the Dark - A Criticism of the Principles of Home Rule as Illustrated by the - Bill of 1893 • A.V. Dicey
... room, so hungry that my pulse increased or decreased as you neared or retreated from the closet where you kept that cake. I 'll admit that this condition was a good deal my fault,—I had a cursed false pride that forbade my doing for grub what some of the fellows did. Then, too, I was an optimist; it was coming out all right in the end. But it did n't ...
— The Seventh Noon • Frederick Orin Bartlett
... he felt more like laughing or crying. He was fairly close to home, anyhow. They did have space traffic here. And being pretty much of an optimist, he also decided that it was a time-track where he had been known. Only being so long overdue, he had probably been ...
— Next Door, Next World • Robert Donald Locke
... grain soaked in alcohol, or strychnia, by fair means or foul. But personally, I am taking no share in his destruction. Any bird-lover, after reading the foregoing account, can scarcely have missed the undercurrent of my affection for the little rascal. He is a thorough optimist; he is absolutely persistent; no hardship seems to dampen his ardor. His heart is valiant above that of most birds so that he has dared to make of man his near neighbor when other birds consider him their worst enemy. I love him for it. When I am in the midst ...
— The Meaning of Evolution • Samuel Christian Schmucker
... for several years the most popular author of books on politics and economics in Germany. He is described by his translator as a "constructive optimist," one who, at the same time, is an incisive critic of those shortcomings which have kept Germany, as he thinks, from playing the great part to which she is called. In this volume Dr. Rohrbach gives a true insight into the character of the German people, ...
— A Journal of Impressions in Belgium • May Sinclair
... opportunities, persons, ideas, and facts tending to promote the objects thought of. The man who is looking for facts to prove certain theories, invariably finds them, and is also quite likely to overlook facts tending to disprove his theory. The Optimist and the Pessimist passing along the same streets, each sees thousands of examples tending to fit in with his idea. As Kay says: "When one is engaged in seeking for a thing, if he keep the image of it clearly before the mind, ...
— A Series of Lessons in Raja Yoga • Yogi Ramacharaka
... and at the beginning of the next year, was almost invariably cheerful, and she showed by the completion of Persuasion that she was capable of first-rate literary work during the summer of 1816. The fact is that, as to health, she was an incurable optimist; her natural good spirits made her see the best side, and her unselfishness prompted the suppression of anything that might distress those around her. Nothing, for instance, could be more lively than the ...
— Jane Austen, Her Life and Letters - A Family Record • William Austen-Leigh and Richard Arthur Austen-Leigh
... had a poor taste in dress. She wore her 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 Campaign." Cured of this, she had become a gentle Socialist, and embraced the belief ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... of us—that matchless optimist, Sandy Sawtelle—sounds a flat note in the symphony of disillusion. His humanness rebounds more quickly than ours, who will not fawn upon life for twenty minutes yet. Sandy comes back to the table from the hook ...
— Ma Pettengill • Harry Leon Wilson
... he had supported under Louis Philippe, president of the council of state. But his powers were now failing, and he had only filled his new office for about a year when he died at Bougival on the 6th of August 1873. He had been sufficiently an optimist to believe in the triumph of the liberal but non-republican institutions dear to him under the restoration, under Louis Philippe and Louis Napoleon successively. He was unable to foresee and unwilling to accept the consequences of his political ...
— Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th Edition, Volume 3, Part 1, Slice 3 - "Banks" to "Bassoon" • Various
... the "human document" of Degas. Renoir's philosophy is not profound; for him life is not a curse or a kiss, as we used to say in the old Swinburne days. He is a painter of joyous surfaces and he is an incorrigible optimist. He is also a poet. The poet of air, sunshine, and beautiful women—can we ever forget his Jeanne Samary? A pantheist, withal a poet and a direct descendant in the line of Watteau, Boucher, Monticelli, with an individual touch of mundane ...
— Promenades of an Impressionist • James Huneker
... man with whom I'd have trusted my life," said I. "Sometimes I think all men are dishonest. I've tried to be an optimist like you, and have told myself that most men must be honest or ninety-five per cent. of the business couldn't be done on ...
— The Deluge • David Graham Phillips
... The obstinate 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 ...
— The Second Deluge • Garrett P. Serviss
... perception of an artist. An experience of three years on the staff had made him an expert on ceremonies, and, captious as he could be when the occasion merited his scorn, his predilection was for praise, as he was an optimist by instinct. This time he could praise unreservedly, and he was impatient to transfer to the pages of his note-book his seething impressions of the solemn beauty and simplicity of the last rites in the painful tragedy. In the rustic church into ...
— The Law-Breakers and Other Stories • Robert Grant
... 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 turn ...
— The Automobile Girls in the Berkshires - The Ghost of Lost Man's Trail • Laura Dent Crane
... once the exchanges of the world have righted themselves—and that is bound to come about sooner or later—then will follow such a reaction in the trade of the country that will exceed the expectations of the most sanguinary optimist."—Trade Paper. ...
— Punch, or the London Charivari, Volume 159, December 29, 1920 • Various
... 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 ...
— The Fighting Shepherdess • Caroline Lockhart
... live wi'" and so on—but to me he seems the most cheerful and constant companion in nature. He is a bringer of good tidings—a philosopher who insists that we are masters of our fate and that winter is just the time when there is some sense in being an optimist. Anybody, he seems to say, can be an optimist when the days are long and the air is warm and worms are plentiful; but it is just when things are looking a little black and the other fellows begin to ...
— Pebbles on the Shore • Alpha of the Plough (Alfred George Gardiner)
... lie about her husband? Well, perhaps he's an incurable optimist," he summed up, springing ...
— The Fruit of the Tree • Edith Wharton
... the matter of that," returned Patty the optimist, "before we know it we'll be walking up one side of the platform for our diplomas and coming down the ...
— When Patty Went to College • Jean Webster
... 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 Liberal opinions. Burke was all his life through a passionate ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... 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 strong took what they wanted,—a doctrine of which I had ...
— The Crossing • Winston Churchill
... On the ruin of all philosophies and religions Montaigne, like Nietzsche, has built up a dogmatism of his own. The foundation of that dogmatism in both is an unbounded faith in life and in nature. Like Nietzsche, Montaigne is an optimist. At the very outset of the "Essays" he proclaims the joy of life. He preaches the gaya scienza, the froehliche Wissenschaft. All our sufferings are due to our departing from the teachings of Nature. The chapter on cannibalism, from which Shakespeare has borrowed a famous passage in ...
— German Problems and Personalities • Charles Sarolea
... "Optimist!" replied the Navigator composedly. "News, indeed! This isn't Wolff's Agency, my lad. This is a Cook's tour of the North Sea." He sniffed the damp, salt breeze. "Bracing air, change of scenery: no undue excitement—sort ...
— The Long Trick • Lewis Anselm da Costa Ritchie
... some hint of a fortunate thing ordained. Who does not know what it is to feel at times a wave of unaccountable persuasion that it is about to go well with him?—not the feverish confidence of men in danger of a blow from fate, not the persistent illusion of the optimist, but an unsought conviction, springing up like a bird from the heather, that success is at hand in some great or fine thing. The general suddenly knows at dawn that the day will bring him victory; the man on the green suddenly knows that he will put down the long putt. As Trent ...
— Trent's Last Case - The Woman in Black • E.C. (Edmund Clerihew) Bentley
... Don't you worry about ways and means; something will surely turn up before long." Peggy was an optimist. ...
— The Lee Shore • Rose Macaulay
... is a profound optimist, and apparently not a little proud of it. He recently said ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... would I could share your optimism," he said. "What a picture have we! The most venerable statesman in the country finding some hope for individual liberty in this Constitution; the youngest, an optimist by nature and habit, sanguine by youth and temperament, trembling for the powers it may confer upon a people too democratically inclined. This is true, sir—is ...
— The Conqueror • Gertrude Franklin Atherton
... often that two people look at the same thing at the same time, and each of the two sees something entirely different from the other. Somebody has described the optimist as the man who sees the doughnut, while the pessimist sees nothing but the hole. So, also, you and I might see before us nothing but an unshapely block of marble, while the sculptor would see the ...
— Crayon and Character: Truth Made Clear Through Eye and Ear - Or, Ten-Minute Talks with Colored Chalks • B.J. Griswold
... company, but offered her no assistance; she appeared to be absorbed in considering, without enthusiasm but with perfect lucidity, the new conveniences of her own situation. Mrs. Touchett was not an optimist, but even from painful occurrences she managed to extract a certain utility. This consisted in the reflexion that, after all, such things happened to other people and not to herself. Death was disagreeable, but in this case it was her ...
— The Portrait of a Lady - Volume 2 (of 2) • Henry James
... view of the ideal, humanity is triste and ugly. But if we compare 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 ...
— Library Of The World's Best Literature, Ancient And Modern, Vol. 2 • Charles Dudley Warner
... waters. It was also 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 ...
— Innocents abroad • Mark Twain
... an optimist than he is, I guess," laughed Bob. "He's heard a lot of things that have made him sort ...
— Bob Cook and the German Spy • Tomlinson, Paul Greene
... le Rouge?" 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 ...
— Riders of the Silences • Max Brand
... I told you I wanted to raise a discussion on this subject. I really am a dyed-in-the-wool optimist. I am willing to sacrifice some nut trees to laboratory purposes for the benefit of our young men. We want the individuals to profit by the education. This should be ...
— Northern Nut Growers Association Report of the Proceedings at the Sixth Annual Meeting. Rochester, New York, September 1 and 2, 1915 • Various
... sailing-ship, had 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 happen ...
— The Mutiny of the Elsinore • Jack London
... rather handsome in appearance, with great blue eyes, very fine silky blonde hair, and a clear, pink, and white complexion. His head, somewhat narrow just above the ears, indicated a mild, easy-going, gentle disposition. The large, rounded dome just above temples was typical of the irrepressible optimist. His forehead, very full and bulging just below the hair line, showed him to be of the thoughtful, meditative, drearily type, while flatness and narrowness at the brows told as plainly as print of the utter impracticability ...
— Analyzing Character • Katherine M. H. Blackford and Arthur Newcomb
... practised what 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 I ought to be ...
— The Life of John Ruskin • W. G. Collingwood
... manifest in Jesus Christ. One or two other passages of the essay may be noted as illustrating certain characteristics of the writer's modes of thought and feeling: "Everywhere is apparent Shelley's belief in the existence of Good, to which Evil is an accident"—it is an optimist here, though of a subtler doctrine than Shelley's, who is applauding optimism. "Shelley was tender, though tenderness is not always the characteristic of very sincere natures; he was eminently both tender and sincere." Was Browning consulting his own heart, which was always sincere, and could ...
— Robert Browning • Edward Dowden
... the day when he was to arrive seemed to her to be odiously long. She was at the station before the train arrived. A delay had been signalled. It weighed heavily upon her. Optimist in her projects, and placing by force, like her father, faith on the side of her will, that delay which she had not foreseen seemed to her to be treason. The gray light, which the three-quarters of an hour filtered through the window-panes of the station, ...
— The Red Lily, Complete • Anatole France
... where we stand on our national energy effort today reminds me of the old argument about whether the tank is half full or half empty. The pessimist will say we have half failed to achieve our 10-year energy goals; the optimist will say that we have half succeeded. I am always an optimist, but we must make ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... crutch. He talked mainly of his good friends in Boston and elsewhere, and alluded to his enemies without a particle of rancor. The lines on his noble face were as placid as those on the brow of an ox—not one showed petulance or discouragement. He was the optimist in every word. ...
— A Son of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... doubt that it often does so; and it is well that we should see this sometimes, to make us strong to contend with evil before it works out this, its worst mischief, and to rouse us from the easy optimist laziness which sits idle while others are being wronged, and bids them believe 'that all will come right in the end,' when it is our direct duty to do our utmost to ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... know," said the Duke of Chester, who was an optimist, "it's jolly good for some things. You can't beat ...
— The Innocence of Father Brown • G. K. Chesterton
... heaping 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 so ...
— The Gold Girl • James B. Hendryx
... act, and then an idea came to him that might be worth heeding. In any case his situation was still very desperate; on that score he allowed himself no illusions. That they would take his drowning for granted, and never come to satisfy themselves, he was not optimist enough to assume. ...
— St. Martin's Summer • Rafael Sabatini
... vanity of man's life—man who lives like the angels and dies like the brutes—the mortal paradox that has puzzled all thinkers from the Psalmist to Pascal. For the unbeliever this must ever be the ugly reverse of all glories that are merely material, though the sensuous optimist need not allow the skeleton at the feast ...
— Without Prejudice • Israel Zangwill
... has 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 ...
— Nonsenseorship • G. G. Putnam
... have suited a thorough-going pessimist. Neither Swift nor Carlyle could have gone much beyond him in condemning the actual state of the political or religious condition of the world. Things, on the whole, were in many directions going from bad to worse. The optimist is apt to regard these views as wicked, and I do not know whether it will be considered as an aggravation or an extenuation of his offence that, holding such opinions, Fitzjames could be steadily cheerful. I simply state the fact. His freedom ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... trust cheerfully to the homesickness and essential modesty of its influential people, and the simpler patriotism of its colonial dependencies when it comes at last to the bloody and wearisome business of "muddling through." But these days of the happy-go-lucky optimist are near their end. War is being drawn into the field of the exact sciences. Every additional weapon, every new complication of the art of war, intensifies the need of deliberate preparation, and darkens the outlook of a nation of amateurs. Warfare in the future, on sea or land alike, ...
— Anticipations - Of the Reaction of Mechanical and Scientific Progress upon - Human life and Thought • Herbert George Wells |
