"Pessimism" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... discourses. Faith is not to believe the Bible, but to believe in God; if you believe in God (or, for it's the same thing, have that assurance you speak about), where is there any more room for terror? There are only three possible attitudes - Optimism, which has gone to smash; Pessimism, which is on the rising hand, and very popular with many clergymen who seem to think they are Christians. And this Faith, which is the Gospel. Once you hold the last, it is your business (1) to find out what is right in any given case, ...
— The Letters of Robert Louis Stevenson - Volume 1 • Robert Louis Stevenson
... to Philip's eager questioning, but with a merry, rather stupid laugh, hinted at a romantic amour; he quoted a few lines of Rossetti, and once showed Philip a sonnet in which passion and purple, pessimism and pathos, were packed together on the subject of a young lady called Trude. Hayward surrounded his sordid and vulgar little adventures with a glow of poetry, and thought he touched hands with Pericles ...
— Of Human Bondage • W. Somerset Maugham
... a question of pessimism. Schopenhauer is generally, and with reason, regarded as a pessimist; but no one who has read his "World as Will and Idea" can visualise Schopenhauer, even in the sphere of pure thought, as ...
— Suspended Judgments - Essays on Books and Sensations • John Cowper Powys
... to wit—all that passes from generation to generation, the capital sum without the results of individual usury; then we are freed, at least, from undue pessimism at the thought of the many harmful functions and environments that disfigure our civilization. Many detrimental acquired characters are to be seen all around us, but if they are not transmissible, they ...
— Introduction to the Science of Sociology • Robert E. Park
... of socio-psychic dissociation. It is a period of relative disorganization, when the individual is subjected to a great variety of new experiences, when outside influences prevail over the inner impulses of the individual, in which the individual is unsettled and there is a tendency toward pessimism and melancholia. Lamprecht thinks of this state as something transitory, and already as he writes (in 1905) nearing an end. This state of continuous excitement, with its shallow pathos of the individual and its constant and superficial happiness, its worship of the novel ...
— The Psychology of Nations - A Contribution to the Philosophy of History • G.E. Partridge
... socialism as a failure, or to stand by it as a course of action which was logical but had not, as yet, been able to accomplish its end. He decided to stand by it; he could not see himself plunging into the unutterable pessimism of believing that all of mankind were such beast fools that, after this one great sin, they could not repent and turn from tribal murder. And what other remedy was there? If socialism had not prevented the war, neither had ...
— The Trail of the Hawk - A Comedy of the Seriousness of Life • Sinclair Lewis
... smiler at the answers she received. I daresay she used to ask questions—without result—long before she could talk, but I am quite sure she was not embittered by the lack of result. Nothing ever embittered Jay, not even her own pessimism. There is a finality about bitterness, and Jay was never final. Her last word was always on a questioning note. Her mind was always open, waiting for more. "Oh no," she would tell her pillow at night, "there must be a better answer than ...
— This Is the End • Stella Benson
... the river's merging in the sea suggests the close of life as we know it here, must we also grant that the natural-mystic must give way to a partial, if not an absolute, tendency to pessimism? That a natural-mystic should be a pessimist would seem to be an anomaly. For he holds that he can hold living communion with the Real; and such communion would carry with it, surely, a strong hope, if not a conviction, that change in material form cannot affect the inner ...
— Nature Mysticism • J. Edward Mercer
... result would never be worth the cost and that he, too, would come in for a measurable share of their censure. But deep and lasting as his sympathy was for those who had been brought into this maelstrom of war, yet, pessimism found no lodgment within him, rather was his great soul illuminated with the thought that with splendid heroism they had died in order that others might live the better. Twice before had the great republic been baptized in blood and each time the result had changed the thought ...
— Philip Dru: Administrator • Edward Mandell House
... Taft was one of the few who could afford to remain in Chicago for its public supported him handsomely, but those of us who wrote had no organizations to help sustain our self-esteem. Nevertheless I permitted him to imagine my pessimism to be only a mood which, in some degree it was, for I had many noble friends in the city who invited me to dinner even if they ...
— A Daughter of the Middle Border • Hamlin Garland
... outcome of a rare moment of pessimism. In his brighter moods he continued to express unbounded faith in the hens, and was willing to leave the ...
— Love Among the Chickens - A Story of the Haps and Mishaps on an English Chicken Farm • P. G. Wodehouse
... fellow had anything.' But painful as facts of this sort necessarily are, any damaging inference we might feel disposed to draw from them is dispelled by a comparison of price-lists. Compare a bookseller's catalogue of 1862 with one of the present year, and your pessimism is washed away by the tears which unrestrainedly flow as you see what bonnes fortunes you have lost. A young book-buyer might well turn out upon Primrose Hill and bemoan his youth, after comparing old ...
— Obiter Dicta - Second Series • Augustine Birrell
... The wonder turns to mere mysticism; and mere mysticism always turns to mere immoralism. The wilfulness is no longer liked, but is actually obeyed. The fear becomes a philosophy. Panic hardens into pessimism; or else, what is often ...
— The Crimes of England • G.K. Chesterton
... say that M. Halevy's irony is delicate and playful. There is no harshness in his manner and no hatred in his mind. We do not find in his pages any of the pessimism which is perhaps the dominant characteristic of the best French fiction of our time. To M. Halevy, as to every thinking man, life is serious, no doubt, but it need not be taken sadly, or even solemnly. To him life seems still enjoyable, as it must to most of those who have ...
— Parisian Points of View • Ludovic Halevy
... natural use, unless punishment may in some measure be retributive. We cannot admit such a flaw in nature. All healthy philosophy goes on the principle, that what is natural is so far forth good. Otherwise we lapse into Manicheism, pessimism, scepticism, abysses beyond the reach of argument. Vengeance undoubtedly prompts to many crimes, but so does the passion of love. Both are natural impulses. It would scarcely be an exaggeration to set down one third of human transgressions to love, ...
— Moral Philosophy • Joseph Rickaby, S. J.
... it confound once more an incurious generation. Groveling, man knows well; despair is seldom alien; yet these are perversities, no part of man's true lot. The day he wills, he is set on the path to freedom. Too long has he hearkened to the dank pessimism of his "dust-thou-art" counselors, heedless of ...
— Autobiography of a YOGI • Paramhansa Yogananda
... herself. "In this country," she says, "the gentlemen have not those accomplishments; they care nothing for the results of modern research; and it will not help a young person to be sought in marriage that she can give an account of the last German theory of Pessimism." That is possible; and I have never concealed from her that it was not for this country that I had educated her. If she marries in the United States it is, of course, my intention that my son-in-law shall accompany us to Europe. But, when she calls ...
— The Point of View • Henry James
... the least dependence on the words of a man's best friend under such conditions," he told her, "for he covers his chagrin at losing a comrade by a display of pessimism which ...
— The Net • Rex Beach
... a popular faith that "God takes care of children, fools, and the United States." Until within a few years probably not one in a hundred of our population has ever questioned the security of our future. Such optimism is as senseless as pessimism is faithless. The one is as foolish as the other ...
— Aliens or Americans? • Howard B. Grose
... thing which could have stayed the tide of Jean Jacques' pessimism and broken his cloud of gloom. She appealed to him in the tune of an old song. The years and the curses of years had not dispelled the illusion that he was a philosopher. He stopped with his ...
— The Judgment House • Gilbert Parker
... the old Roman virtues had taken flight, men were leading happy, useful lives, because the strong hand of the imperial government had come to save them from the inefficiency of aristocratic governors. This narrowness of view accounts for much of Tacitus' pessimism. ...
— Tacitus: The Histories, Volumes I and II • Caius Cornelius Tacitus
... go handing out your troubles to your busy fellow-men— If you whine around they'll try to keep from meeting you again; Don't declare the world's "agin" you, Don't let pessimism win you, Prove there's lots of good ...
— It Can Be Done - Poems of Inspiration • Joseph Morris
... is a poem called "Lucretius on Life and Death," and was partly suggested by the vogue acquired by Fitzgerald's rendering of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The doctrine of Omar is, as everybody knows, a doctrine of voluptuous pessimism. There is no life other than this. Let us kiss and drink while it lasts. The doctrine of Lucretius is to a certain extent similar, but is sterner and more intellectual in its form. I accordingly selected from his great scientific poem, which ...
— Memoirs of Life and Literature • W. H. Mallock
... and learning and wit, teaching pessimism,—teaching that this is the worst of all possible worlds, and inferring that sleep is better than waking, and death than sleep,—all the talent in the world cannot save him from being odious. But if instead of these negatives you give ...
— Ralph Waldo Emerson • Oliver Wendell Holmes
... way to pessimism. You must rouse yourself, you must look life in the face. I know ...
— Anna Karenina • Leo Tolstoy
... east of the Rhine seemed to have rallied firmly behind the Teuton Government; but with the first slight setbacks of the following month the process of crumbling began. An American economist and banker, Henry C. Emery, then prisoner in Germany, tells of the pessimism prevalent as early as June and the whispers of the approaching fall of the Kaiser. In his memoirs Ludendorff lays the failure of the German armies in August to the complete ...
— Woodrow Wilson and the World War - A Chronicle of Our Own Times. • Charles Seymour
... a long talk after that, and he told me fully what shape his thoughts had been taking. It was that same story, which so many people have been telling of late years, of sneering pessimism as to the human race and its possibilities, and of contempt for the labors and rewards of life. We argued the matter for hours, and each one of us convinced himself that the ...
— Emerson's Wife and Other Western Stories • Florence Finch Kelly
... gloom succeeded each other swiftly within Will Blanchard's mind, and at first he discounted the consistent pessimism of Doctor Parsons somewhat more liberally than the issue justified. When, therefore, he was informed of the truth and stood face to face with his mother's danger, hope sank, and his unstable spirit was swept from an altitude ...
— Children of the Mist • Eden Phillpotts
... comparative amount of happiness and misery in the world is worth much; but for my own part, if I trusted simply to empirical evidence, {62} I should not be disposed to do more than slightly attenuate the pessimism of the Pessimists. At all events, Nature is far too 'red in tooth and claw' to permit of our basing an argument for a benevolent deity upon a contemplation of the facts of animal and human life. There is but one source from which such an idea can possibly be derived—from ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... Professor Huxley tells us, are always with us, and even increase in quantity and intensity as evolution advances. The fact had been recognised in remote ages long before theories of evolution had taken their modern form. Pessimism, from the time of the ancient Hindoo philosophers to the time of their disciple, Schopenhauer, has been in no want of evidence to support its melancholy conclusions. It would be idle to waste rhetoric in the attempt ...
— Social Rights and Duties, Volume I (of 2) - Addresses to Ethical Societies • Sir Leslie Stephen
... most inspired exponent of love among modern artists, declared that of all values love was the greatest. His intuitive genius left all the doctrines formulated by Schopenhauer and Buddha far behind and definitely rejected pessimism as a creed. There is an interesting letter from him to Matilda Wesendonk, written while he was composing the music of Tristan, and containing modifications of Schopenhauer's philosophy which he considered requisite. ...
— The Evolution of Love • Emil Lucka
... impossible to guarantee a ticket to Marseilles." So the ticket vendor at Folkestone had informed them, and his pessimism was ...
— No Man's Land • H. C. McNeile
... we shared insensibly from being connected with that growth. In retrospect now, and giving due recognition to this crescent spirit, I recall that, in spite of it, Omar Khayyam was the favorite poet of many of us, that introspection, which sometimes deepened into pessimism, was in vogue, and that a spiritual or philosophic languorous disenchantment sicklied o'er the somewhat mottled ...
— Theodore Roosevelt; An Intimate Biography, • William Roscoe Thayer
... pessimism? Listen, heart of my heart, I have a new story for you." He moved closer to her, and put his arm round her neck. "There was once a man ...
— Maurice Guest • Henry Handel Richardson
... been ashamed to describe. In these dreams, of course, he figured in noble and romantic parts, but self-glorification was not the only motive of them. They gave outlet to some spirit which found no work to do in real life, for, with the pessimism which his lot forced upon him, Ralph had made up his mind that there was no use for what, contemptuously enough, he called dreams, in the world which we inhabit. It sometimes seemed to him that this spirit was the most valuable ...
— Night and Day • Virginia Woolf
... the sins of France required, and that when the number of these acts of expiation should be large enough, God would smite France no more. What a harsh belief in the necessity of chastisement! What a ferocious idea born of the gloomiest pessimism! How evil life must be if it were indeed necessary that such imploring cries, such cries of physical and moral wretchedness, should ever and ever ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... Humboldt: "I am not built for the father of a family. Moreover, I consider marriage a sin, and the begetting of children a crime." What of it? The power of natural instincts will restore the equilibrium. We are alarmed neither by a Humboldt's hostility to marriage nor by the philosophic pessimism of a Schopenhauer, a Mainlaender or a v. Hartmann, who raise to man the prospect of self-destruction in the "ideal State," In this matter we hold with Fr. Ratzel, ...
— Woman under socialism • August Bebel
... the influence of her personality. Added to this she talked cleverly, and even brilliantly. The tone of her conversation was at times acrid and gloomy. Long years of toil in a hard, unjust world had borne the fruit of pessimism. She was too apt to overlook the bright for the dark side of a picture. But this was a fault which was amply counterbalanced by her talents. For the first time she made friends who were competent to justly measure ...
— Mary Wollstonecraft • Elizabeth Robins Pennell
... the times, but his race and all mankind, are out of joint. He is not especially Polish save by birth; he is as little at home in Paris or at Rome as in Warsaw. Set him down in any quarter of the globe and he would be equally out of place. He folds the mantle of his pessimism about him. Life has interested him purely as a spectacle, in which he plays no part save a purely passive one. His relation to life is that of the Greek chorus, passing across the stage, ...
— Without Dogma • Henryk Sienkiewicz
... must Death also be satirised in his person and with his aid. The branch, though it is probably not a very early one, is of an admirable humour, and an uncompromising truth after a fashion, which makes the elaborate realism and pessimism of some other periods look singularly poor, thin, and conventional. The author, for the keeping of his story, begins by showing the doomed fox more than a little "failed"—the shadow of fate dwelling coldly beforehand on him. He is badly mauled at the opening (though, it ...
— The Flourishing of Romance and the Rise of Allegory - (Periods of European Literature, vol. II) • George Saintsbury
... about to have something like a "Committee of Public Safety." Marvellous race, the English! Lord Derby seems to be an outstanding personality just now. Have you noticed how each month of the war is marked by some new phase of public opinion? Optimism, pessimism, spies, Zeppelins, economy, pink forms, voluntaryism, conscription, munitions—each of these has been for a time the centre of public interest, and each has swiftly fallen from its pedestal to be replaced by some other phase. Curiously enough, the talk at home has not been influenced ...
— War Letters of a Public-School Boy • Henry Paul Mainwaring Jones
... proposed school for the instruction of mothers. She often had heard her father say that a good mother was an exception. She had not believed him—had taken it for granted that this idea of his was a part of his habitual pessimism. But since she had come up to the city and become an officer of the Children's Protective Association, she had changed her mind, and a number of times she had been on the point of writing to her father to tell him that ...
— The Precipice • Elia Wilkinson Peattie
... before it is necessary—" I began, smiling at his elaborate, scientific pessimism. But I was interrupted by a startled ...
— Astounding Stories of Super-Science September 1930 • Various
... preoccupation being uniformly with beauty in one form or another, whether of matter or of spirit. With him, a gloom which, did we not fear to be less than just to Galt we might denominate Byronic, fills perhaps the place of Zola's pessimism. Next, of that misbegotten passion for the painter's brush which has vitiated so much of modern French writing, and of which Zola in inferior works has even more than his due share, the novel of ...
— Ringan Gilhaize - or The Covenanters • John Galt
... mind, more or less,' said Morton, in his dreamy voice—a voice good for the nerves. 'It comes generally when one's stomach is out of order. You wake at half-past two in the morning, and suffer infernally from the blackest pessimism. It's morbid—yes; but for all that it may be a glimpse of the truth. Health and good spirits, just as likely as not, are ...
— The Whirlpool • George Gissing
... Church cut off the extremities and one-sidedness in empiricism and supernaturalism, in rationalism and mysticism, in optimism and pessimism. All these systems represented the human effort to solve the riddle of our life without taking any notice of the Church and her wisdom. And all failed to become the universally accepted truth, but all of them helped the Church unconsciously ...
— The Agony of the Church (1917) • Nikolaj Velimirovic
... refuge in abstractions. They talked of dykes and windmills and cigars, the history of Holland and its constitution, the constitution of the United States and the edifying spectacle of the politics of that blessed country. They talked of political economy and pessimism and cattle rearing, the state of agriculture in England, the foreign policy of the day, Anarchism, the President of the French Republic. They would have talked of bi-metallism if they could. People hearing them would have thought them very learned ...
— Orientations • William Somerset Maugham
... under this new law the papers said had been discovered; all so that the unions might break down and the squatters do as they liked. Which, perhaps, was why her thoughts for the time being were particularly tinged with pessimism. If the vague something called "law and order" was determined to be broken so that the bush could be dragooned for the squatter it seemed to her as well to make a substantial breakage while men were about it—and she did not ...
— The Workingman's Paradise - An Australian Labour Novel • John Miller
... is the principal challenge to stability. The Iraqi people have a democratically elected government, yet it is not adequately advancing national reconciliation, providing basic security, or delivering essential services. Pessimism ...
— The Iraq Study Group Report • United States Institute for Peace
... boat for ten other people. Ten brave men would have received the warmest welcome of their lives if they had been there. The coward, being a quartermaster and the assigned head of the boat, sat in the stern and steered. He was terrified, and the women had to fight against his pessimism while ...
— Sinking of the Titanic - and Great Sea Disasters • Various
... the weakness of good, nothing but the strength of evil, does not inspire us to contend for the right, does not inform us of the powers and weapons with which we might so contend. To gaze at unqualified and inevitable moral defeat will but leave us to the still worse laziness of pessimism, uttering its discouraging and blasphemous cry, 'It does not matter; nothing will ...
— Robert Louis Stevenson - a Record, an Estimate, and a Memorial • Alexander H. Japp
... incidentally, some favourite character which does credit to humanity. Out-and-out pessimists accuse him of distorting human nature by attributing to it imaginary graces and virtues: but does not their unbending pessimism distort it in another direction by showing to us, under the pretext of being truthful, only its meannesses and its horrors?—From PELLISSIER, Le Mouvement ...
— Le Petit Chose (part 1) - Histoire d'un Enfant • Alphonse Daudet
... deep—life—to be solved by fifty years of living. There is far too much in the blue firmament, too many stars, to be dissolved in the feeble logic of a single brain. We are not yet great enough, even this explanatory person, to grasp the "scheme of things entire." This is no place for weak pessimism—this universe. This is Mystery and out of Mystery springs the fine adventure! What we have seen or felt, what we think we know, are insignificant compared with that ...
— Adventures In Contentment • David Grayson
... Trendelenburg, and Hermann Lotze. Lotze. in his Microcosm, has unfolded, in a style attractive to the general reader, profound and genial views of man, nature, and religion. A remarkable phenomenon in German speculation is "pessimism,"—the doctrine gravely propounded in the systems of Schopenhauer and E. Von Hartmann, that the world is radically and essentially evil, and personal existence a curse from which the refuge is in the hope of annihilation. ...
— Outline of Universal History • George Park Fisher
... gall under pressure as of yore. None was ever cheered or heartened by anything he might say; but to cast a neighbour down, or make a confident and contented man doubtful and discontented, affected Mr. Baggs favourably and rendered him as cheerful as his chronic pessimism ...
— The Spinners • Eden Phillpotts
... attacked on opposite grounds at once. It is condemned for being pessimistic, it is blamed for being optimistic. From this position Chesterton deduces that it is the only rational religion, because it steers between the Scylla of pessimism and avoids the Charybdis of a facile optimism. Regarding presumably the early Church she has also kept from extremes. She has ignored the easy path of heresy, she has adhered to the adventurous road of orthodoxy. ...
— Gilbert Keith Chesterton • Patrick Braybrooke
... their brain capital. Then they grow hopeless toward home and business. Ill-health spreads a gloom over all life. Every judgment is pessimistic; it could not be otherwise. The jaundiced eye yellows the landscape. The sweetest music rasps like a file upon the nervous ear. Thomas Carlyle's pessimism was largely physical. He overworked upon his life of Oliver Cromwell. Maurice once said: "Carlyle believed in God down to the time of Oliver Cromwell." Once, in a moment of depression, Lyman Beecher prayed: "Lord, keep us from despising our rulers, and help them to stop acting ...
— The Investment of Influence - A Study of Social Sympathy and Service • Newell Dwight Hillis
... you call pessimism," Lorne rejoined. "I see England down the future the heart of the Empire, the conscience of the world. and the Mecca ...
— The Imperialist • (a.k.a. Mrs. Everard Cotes) Sara Jeannette Duncan
... contentment which accepts the fact that there is a chain of causes linked to effects by an invincible necessity; and that whatever is, could not have wisely been but so. And if this was fatalism, it was at least a brighter thing than the languid pessimism, which would have led her life among quicksands, to end it ...
— The Maid of Maiden Lane • Amelia E. Barr
... take their place. Young people with strong natures can seldom find the middle course between extremes, and this one, in curbing a desire for power, will fairly crush his whole vigour, while that one, in revolt against the tyranny of love, will become the slave of pessimism. There were days, no doubt, and weeks when Orange found every counsel, a mockery, and every law, a paradox. The strife between the flesh and the spirit went on in his life as it does in all lives, but he was one who held, that, whatever the issue of it all might be, a man must be a man while ...
— Robert Orange - Being a Continuation of the History of Robert Orange • John Oliver Hobbes
... extremely sophisticated and complex man. His letters reveal him as remarkably creative, fascinated by the arts, principled, religious and devoted to his father. He had an energetic personality that was almost completely devoid of any cynicism, pessimism or discouragement from creating music. While rumors suggest that he was a lascivious individual, there is no evidence of this at all in his letters. Quite the contrary, the evidence seems overwhelmingly to suggest the opposite, and that ...
— Mozart: The Man and the Artist, as Revealed in his own Words • Friedrich Kerst and Henry Edward Krehbiel
... magic force and inspiration belonging to the life of this earth. We are inclined to forget that the way of excellence is in the intellectual, as distinguished from emotional, humility. What one feels so hopelessly barren in declared pessimism is just its arrogance. It seems as if the discovery made by many men at various times that there is much evil in the world were a source of proud and unholy joy unto some of the modern writers. That ...
— Notes on Life and Letters • Joseph Conrad
... She is fascinated by the profound interest he displays when she speaks of herself. Besides, from what he tells her she gathers he is a man of genius, destroyed by pessimism, given to analyse human hearts and discover their misery, to look deeply into the lives of his fellow creatures, below the platitudes and conventionalities. He is richly endowed with the divine gift of sympathy, the supreme art of discrimination, yet occasionally ...
— When the Birds Begin to Sing • Winifred Graham
... moralist, the philosopher, the theologian—that vitiates his argument against the insight of the great artists. Why does he deny them this "penetrating insight?" Because they have cherished opposite convictions about fundamental matters. "Optimism and pessimism; materialism and spiritualism; theism, pantheism, atheism, morality and immorality; religion and irreligion; lofty resignation and passionate revolt—each and all have inspired or helped to inspire the creators of artistic beauty." The non sequitur ...
— Personality in Literature • Rolfe Arnold Scott-James
... Carlyle's early essays and from Sartor Resartus is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts strangely in its hopefulness with ...
— Initial Studies in American Letters • Henry A. Beers
... that the ideals of Eugenics may be expected to work fruitfully. To insist upon the power of heredity was once considered to indicate a fatalistic pessimism. It wears a very different aspect nowadays, in the light of Eugenics. "To the eugenist," as Davenport observes, "heredity stands as the one great hope of the human race: its saviour from imbecility, poverty, disease, immorality."[40] We cannot, indeed, desire any ...
— The Task of Social Hygiene • Havelock Ellis
... line of our absolute certainty as to complete and final victory. The civilian stranger commenced to raise his voice in dissent. We disputed his statements. He then set to work to run through the entire argument of pessimism: America was too far away to be effective; Russia was collapsing; France was exhausted; England had reached the zenith of her endeavour; Italy was not united in purpose. On every front he saw a black cloud rising and took a dyspeptic's delight in ...
— Out To Win - The Story of America in France • Coningsby Dawson
... at different times, its teaching has become both negative and positive, agnostic and gnostic. It passes from apparent atheism and materialism to theism, polytheism, and spiritualism. It is, under one aspect, mere pessimism; under another, pure philanthropy; under another, monastic communion; under another, high morality; under another, a variety of materialistic philosophy; under another, simple demonology; under another, a mere farrago of superstitions, including necromancy, witchcraft, idolatry, and fetishism. ...
— Religion in Japan • George A. Cobbold, B.A.
... of the de Barral failure, whose name would never be known to the Official Receiver, came down to breakfast, impenetrable in her everyday perfection. From the very first, somehow, she had accepted the fatal news for true. All her life she had never believed in her luck, with that pessimism of the passionate who at bottom feel themselves to be the outcasts of a morally restrained universe. But this did not make it any easier, on opening the morning paper feverishly, to see the thing confirmed. Oh yes! It was there. The Orb had suspended payment—the first growl of ...
— Chance - A Tale in Two Parts • Joseph Conrad
... are not given to pessimism which is fortunate. Ever since father died four years ago we have struggled on here, content to give up a good deal just to keep our home and be together. This little gray house—oh, how we do love it and its apple trees—is ours and ...
— Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1907 to 1908 • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... brings with it the thought of the transitoriness of human endeavour, and if the words of the Teacher seem doubly true, "Of making of books there is no end, and much study is a weariness of the flesh," yet in the fresh life of young Oxford, such reflections are only salutary; pessimism, despair of humanity, are not vices likely to flourish among undergraduates in the healthy society of ...
— The Charm of Oxford • J. Wells
... lengthy discussion of how an intelligent country-born person would arrange matters, he senses that the evil moment of going to work can no longer be put off, he directs his lagging steps to the spot where the tools are waiting. These he regards with blackest pessimism. His attitude is that only a city moron would provide such poor things but, of course, he will do the best he can with them. In the course of the day he gets a little work done but in such sketchy fashion that most of ...
— If You're Going to Live in the Country • Thomas H. Ormsbee and Richmond Huntley
... truths are eternal, deep in human nature and the constitution of things. Ah, I wish I could get you to see with the eyes of the great Rabbis and sages in Israel; to look on this human life of ours, not with the pessimism of Christianity, but as a holy and precious gift, to be enjoyed heartily yet spent in God's service—birth, marriage, death, all holy; good, evil, alike holy. Nothing on God's earth common or purposeless. Everything chanting the great song of God's praise; the ...
— Children of the Ghetto • I. Zangwill
... felt that we were even denied what consolation there might have been in being a figment of a corporate man rising from his knees. Do you think that I leaped at this pessimism, grasped it as a sweetly smug superior thing, no more depressing really than, say, a gray autumn day before a fire?—I don't think I did that. I was a great deal too warm for that, ...
— The Beautiful and Damned • F. Scott Fitzgerald
... the result of blind chance," poetry may discover its own new grounds for the attempt. It is easy to assume that all hope and faith are shallow. It is even easier to practise a really shallow and devitalising pessimism. The modern annunciation that there is a skeleton an inch beneath the skin of man is neither new nor profound. Neither science nor poetry can rest there; and if, in this poem, an attempt is made to show that spiritual values are ...
— Watchers of the Sky • Alfred Noyes
... Spencer's hands the theory of evolution acquired a more decidedly optimistic character than in Darwin's; but I shall deal later with the relation of Darwin's hypothesis to the opposition of optimism and pessimism. ...
— Darwin and Modern Science • A.C. Seward and Others
... diffuse by example a deteriorating influence upon the young, and misleading influence upon all, but it actually leads to false views of life, and an unsound philosophy such as transcendental idealism, pessimism, indolence, and the pursuit of visionary falsehoods which a well-balanced mind would intuitively reject. These follies are cultivated by a pedantic system of education, and by the accumulated literature which such education in the past has developed, feeble and faulty ...
— Buchanan's Journal of Man, August 1887 - Volume 1, Number 7 • Various
... the facts with all their consequences, whatever these may be and whatever they may involve for the proudest aspirations of mankind—only thus can truth be attained. And lest any should say that we preach an unrelieved pessimism, let us remind such that Knowledge is not after all the source of Life, that another category and a different principle—that, namely, which we indicate under the term Love-divine—must have generated the potent current of Life, and that no one should ...
— Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge • Alexander Philip
... world; it took no account of society and its needs; it sought to destroy, not to develop, the sense and the power of Individuality. It did not say, but it implied, that creation was a mistake; and if it did not profess pessimism, pessimism was its logical outcome. I do not know whether it is the religion of a wise race; but I am sure it could never be ...
— Appearances - Being Notes of Travel • Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson
... shook her head vaguely. She did not seem to take his remark very seriously, but then, she had learned never to take any of his remarks seriously. She had been puzzled at first by his manner of treating everything with a half-joking pessimism, but now ...
— The Runaway Skyscraper • Murray Leinster
... inevitable result of life's imitative instinct. He is Fact, occupied as Fact usually is, with trying to reproduce Fiction, and what we see in him is repeated on an extended scale throughout the whole of life. Schopenhauer has analysed the pessimism that characterises modern thought, but Hamlet invented it. The world has become sad because a puppet was once melancholy. The Nihilist, that strange martyr who has no faith, who goes to the stake without enthusiasm, and dies for what ...
— Intentions • Oscar Wilde
... life. When her bones ached with agony she would sometimes utter complaints, but she reproached herself immediately. "Oh! how I suffer, oh! how I suffer! but what happiness it is to bear this pain!" There can be no more frightful words, words pregnant with a blacker pessimism. Happy to suffer, O Lord! but why, and to what unknown and senseless end? Where is the reason in this useless cruelty, in this revolting glorification of suffering, when from the whole of humanity there ascends but one desperate longing for health ...
— The Three Cities Trilogy, Complete - Lourdes, Rome and Paris • Emile Zola
... ore in sight, and what value should be assigned to this unknown portion of the deposit admits of no certainty. No engineer can approach the prospective value of a mine with optimism, yet the mining industry would be non-existent to-day were it approached with pessimism. Any value assessed must be a matter of judgment, and this judgment based on geological evidence. Geology is not a mathematical science, and to attach a money equivalence to forecasts based on such ...
— Principles of Mining - Valuation, Organization and Administration • Herbert C. Hoover
... him. James! Always fussy, nervous, anxious! James with his continual, 'I told you how it would be!' and his pessimism, and his cautious investments. There was something uncanny about such resolution in ...
— Forsyte Saga • John Galsworthy
... traitor to labor, this despoiler of ideals, this foe to morality, is not the benefactor but the destroyer of nations? And shall we not "here highly resolve" no longer to walk in this "valley of the shadow of death," but to hasten toward the dawning of a brighter, purer day? For in spite of pessimism, in spite of scholarship, in spite of history, the ...
— Prize Orations of the Intercollegiate Peace Association • Intercollegiate Peace Association
... Marco is the lobby of the opera in the intervals of the performance. The present fortune of Venice, the lamentable difference, is most easily measured there, and that is why, in the effort to resist our pessimism, we must turn away both from the purchasers and from the vendors of ricordi. The ricordi that we prefer are gathered best where the gondola glides—best of all on the noble waterway that begins in its glory at the Salute and ends in its abasement ...
— Italian Hours • Henry James
... contrary, is the cri du coeur of pessimism. This life, it says, is but a chain of sorrows. To multiply days is only to multiply evil. These desires that urge us on are really cause of all our woe. We think they are ourselves. We are mistaken. They are all illusion, and we are victims ...
— The Soul of the Far East • Percival Lowell
... a laugh at her own pessimism, Betty, like Hamlet, having found relief in soliloquy, jumped up from her chair and crossing her room pressed the electric button near the fireplace until the noise of its ringing reverberated through the ...
— The Camp Fire Girls at Sunrise Hill • Margaret Vandercook
... is proclaiming Night and Sin's high noon; follow me and I will show you why I do not believe in "humanity" quite so implicitly as does Sir Edwin; why even Dr. Talmage has failed to wean me from "the awful sin of pessimism." It is not necessary to linger long in the low concert halls and brothels where girls scarce in their teens are made the prey of the rum-inflamed passions of brutes old enough to he their grandsires; where old roues, ...
— Volume 1 of Brann The Iconoclast • William Cowper Brann
... that he had "muddled through." He had preached a very poor sermon in a very poor way, nervously, indeed, almost timidly, and with the manner of a man who was cowed and hopeless. The powerful optimism for which he had once been distinguished had given way to an almost unhealthy pessimism, alien surely to the minds of all believers, of all who profess to look forward to that life of which, as Tolstoi long ago said, our present life is but a dream. Even when he was uttering truths he spoke them as if he had an uneasy suspicion ...
— The Dweller on the Threshold • Robert Smythe Hichens
... dramas which have been held up as triumphs. In these, an inoculation from the French drama seems to have resulted in destruction of the nobler characteristics of the German stage. One detects the cant of Dumas, fils, but not his genius; and, when this cant is mingled with German pessimism, it becomes at times unspeakably repulsive. The zeal for this new drama seems to me a fad, and rather a slimy fad. With all my heart I wish the Emperor success in his effort to keep the German ...
— Autobiography of Andrew Dickson White Volume II • Andrew Dickson White
... subdued is that he has always felt according to tradition, the existence of superior supernatural (and with them patrician) beings, by whose power and patronage he has been effectively restrained or kept under. Hence gloom and pessimism, doubt and despair. It may seem a bold thing to say that it did not occur to any philosopher through the ages that man, resolute and noble and free, might will himself into a stage of mind defying devils and phantasms, or that ...
— The Mystic Will • Charles Godfrey Leland
... sage laughed. "You've been listening to the pessimism of the dear old fellows who drive the few lingering victorias. If you'd believe them, all these people in the motors are chauffeurs ...
— The Daughter of the Storage - And Other Things in Prose and Verse • William Dean Howells
... rule on Saturday evenings they all three went out together to do the marketing, but on this occasion, in consequence of Nora being unwell, Owen and Frankie went by themselves. The frequent recurrence of his wife's illness served to increase Owen's pessimism with regard to the future, and the fact that he was unable to procure for her the comforts she needed was not calculated to dispel the depression that filled his mind as he reflected that there was ...
— The Ragged Trousered Philanthropists • Robert Tressell
... of pessimism in literature, when Tourgueneff and Sacher-Masoch represent man as the victim of blind Chance and annihilation his greatest happiness, it is pleasant to turn to a writer who still believes in God, his country and the ...
— Lippincott's Magazine, December 1878 • Various
... thought differently, and avoided them, he saw no inconsistency in bringing his wife's old friends to divert her: she might in time convert THEM. He had no more fear of her returning to their ways than he had of himself "backsliding." Narrow as was his creed, he had none of the harshness nor pessimism of the bigot. With the keenest self-scrutiny, his credulity regarding others ...
— Mr. Jack Hamlin's Mediation and Other Stories • Bret Harte
... object, sentimentality with irony, world-pain, and allusions to all the kingdoms of heaven and earth, without any explanation as to what relation these allusions bear to each other, and with a Titanic pessimism as its predominating tone, which first rouses itself up to take all by storm, and finishes by being soothed into happy intoxication by the odors of a lily. This is better treatment than The Lily and the Bee ...
— The International Monthly Magazine - Volume V - No II • Various
... and dishonest. They decided that life is sad, that it is quite useless, and that they were all better dead, were it not the indubitable will of God that they should go on living so as to suffer. All these ideas came very near to Christophe's actual pessimism, he thought the better of his landlord, and closed his eyes to their ...
— Jean-Christophe, Vol. I • Romain Rolland
... children, and, after all, there was not such a difference as might appear at first. The thought flashed into Carroll's mind that here was a little, universal well-spring of human nature which was good to see, but the deadly pessimism and despair of his own mood made him straightway corrupt the spring with ...
— The Debtor - A Novel • Mary E. Wilkins Freeman
... is the lot of man when considered in his relations to creatures and to the world. It is a lot full of uncertainty, of instability, of vicissitude; but this should not make us skeptical or cynical; it affords no justification for pessimism. It is a condition arising, on the one hand, from the very nature of limited beings, and on the other, from the vast potentialities of our souls, which, while they are limited in giving to others, ...
— The Shepherd Of My Soul • Rev. Charles J. Callan
... and fears as to his prospects of becoming a Member of Parliament varied no more than was suitable in the possessor of the artistic temperament, but Barty, his agent in chief, maintained an attitude of unbroken pessimism. That whisper of the secret and late-declared antagonism of the Church had reached him, and in the secure seclusion of his own office he inveighed against clerical interference with all the fierceness of a dog chained in his kennel, who knows that his adversaries are as unable to ...
— Mount Music • E. Oe. Somerville and Martin Ross
... Teufelsdrockh, Carlyle tells the story of his early religious doubts, his painful struggles that recall Bunyan's wrestlings with despair, and his final entry upon a new spiritual life. He wrote to let others know how he had emerged from the Valley of the Shadow of Pessimism into the delectable Mountains of Faith. Carlyle was the first of his day to proclaim the great truth that the spiritual life is far more important than the material life, and this he showed by the humorous philosophy of clothes, which he unfolded in the style of the German ...
— Modern English Books of Power • George Hamlin Fitch
... 'em belong when it comes to a woman like Annabel," said Persis with unwonted pessimism. "And Thad's just young enough to be proud of having that sort of acquaintance with a married woman. Men are queer cattle, Mis' West. The worst woman living likes to pretend to herself that she's as good as anybody, but a man who's been decent from the cradle up, gets lots of comfort ...
— Other People's Business - The Romantic Career of the Practical Miss Dale • Harriet L. Smith
... taking any decisive step. Your own attitude of mind towards the 'calling and election' you have chosen has always seemed to me so pre-eminently pure and lofty, that I should condemn ray own feelings even more than I do, were I to allow the twin forces of pessimism and despair to possess me utterly without an attempt to bring them under your sane and healthful exorcism, the more so, as you know all my personal history and life- long sorrow. And this brings me to the ...
— God's Good Man • Marie Corelli
... will prove beneficent. Already far more has been accomplished for the relief of the poor by a combination of laborers against hard-hearted employers than by any legislative enactments; but when will the contest between capital and labor cease? Is it pessimism to say that it is likely to become ...
— Beacon Lights of History, Volume X • John Lord
... 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 it readily spring at all, in minds that have conceived of life as a field of ordered duties, not as a chase in which to ...
— The Pocket R.L.S. - Being Favourite Passages from the Works of Stevenson • Robert Louis Stevenson
... admirable, and more that seemed ignoble, he gravely and reverently sought to possess himself of the subtle arcana of this marvellous book, rejecting as equally erroneous and unreliable the magnifying zeal of optimism and the gloomy jaundiced lenses of sneering pessimism,—thoroughly satisfied that it was a solemn duty, obligatory upon all, to study that complex paradoxical human nature, for the mastery of which Lucifer and Jesus had ceaselessly battled since the ...
— Vashti - or, Until Death Us Do Part • Augusta J. Evans Wilson
... so much torture at night that some of them actually dread to retire because of the long, tedious, wakeful hours. Financial troubles are particularly exaggerated at night; and even many optimists suffer more or less from pessimism then. ...
— Pushing to the Front • Orison Swett Marden
... as a marionette of which he pulls the strings. In this presumptuousness we speedily discern a degree of egoism and, behind this latter, something less spontaneous and more bitter, the beginnings of a curious pessimism which becomes the more pronounced as the laugher more closely analyses ...
— Laughter: An Essay on the Meaning of the Comic • Henri Bergson
... full range for her pessimism that gloomy autumn, and even Susan, incorrigible old optimist as she was, was hard put to it for cheer. When Bulgaria lined up with Germany Susan only remarked scornfully, "One more nation anxious for a licking," but the Greek tangle worried her beyond ...
— Rilla of Ingleside • Lucy Maud Montgomery
... has followed the footsteps of George Sand and of Balzac. He belongs to the school of "Impressionists," and, although he has a liking for exceptional situations, wherefrom humanity does not always issue without serious blotches, he yet is free from pessimism. He has no nervous disorder, no "brain fag," he is no pagan, not even a nonbeliever, and has happily preserved his wholesomeness of thought; he is averse to exotic ideas, extravagant depiction, and inflammatory language. His novels and tales contain ...
— Prince Zilah, Complete • Jules Claretie
... material and mental reaction; whilst it is absurd to believe that men will perpetually promote a growth of culture without ever taking advantage of it. I now see with appalling distinctness that if our toiling masses had not been saved by their social hopes from sharing our economic pessimism, we Liberals would long since have found ourselves in the midst of a reaction of a fearful kind: it is not through us that modern civilisation has been spared the ...
— Freeland - A Social Anticipation • Theodor Hertzka
... frankly must confess A secret unforgivingness, And shudder at the saving chrism Whose best New Birth is Pessimism; My soul—I mean the bit of phosphorus That fills the place of what that was for us— Can't bid its inward bores defiance With the new nursery-tales of science. What profits me, though doubt by doubt, As nail by nail, be driven out, 170 When every new one, like the last, Still holds ...
— The Complete Poetical Works of James Russell Lowell • James Lowell
... her hand again upon his arm and spoke eagerly, forgetting in a moment his pessimism and the little cloud it had ...
— The Call of the Blood • Robert Smythe Hichens
... mundane affairs, their social aspirations and worldly ambitions, at length made her quite unwelcome—Carmen steadily, and without heed of diverting gesture, brought into captivity every thought to the obedience of her Christ-principle, and threw off for all time the dark cloud of pessimism which human belief and the mesmerism of events had ...
— Carmen Ariza • Charles Francis Stocking
... evils which dog our footsteps, were nothing in the scale against the boon of opportunity. Every morning in chapel the doctor voiced our gratitude for the privilege of living and working. And now over heads that moved in such charged airs the Professor cast his pall of pessimism. He took his text from Solomon, and found that all was vanity. It mattered little whether or not what he said was true. He believed it to be true, and for the moment at least his incisive voice and long forefinger carried with them conviction. He railed at the old dictum ...
— David Malcolm • Nelson Lloyd
... fits of pessimism he still strove with all his might, by letters and published pamphlets, to rescue his beloved country from what he believed were the machinations of foreign enemies. At the same time he did not ...
— Samuel F. B. Morse, His Letters and Journals - In Two Volumes, Volume II • Samuel F. B. Morse
... a life of great retirement and seclusion. Her work, the fruit of long solitude, bears the impress of a strong, reflective mind. It is deeply linged with pessimism. ...
— French Lyrics • Arthur Graves Canfield
... His heart seemed gripped by the void; he felt he could no longer live if his faith in the reason of men and their mutual love was destroyed, if he was forced to acknowledge that the Credo of his life and art rested on a mistake, that a dark pessimism was the answer to ...
— Clerambault - The Story Of An Independent Spirit During The War • Rolland, Romain
... the store, entered and called genially for his "bunch of spinach, car-fare grade." This imputation deepened the pessimism of Freshmayer; but he set out a brand that came perilously near to filling the order. Hopkins bit off the roots of his purchase, and lighted up at the swinging gas jet. Feeling in his pockets to make payment, he ...
— The Voice of the City • O. Henry
... contend that the only ground of despair, the only thing that might-shut us up to pessimism and to "a philosophy only just above suicide mark," would be not the presence but the absence of these great world evils. If this world presented a dead-level of comfortable selfishness that on the whole answered fairly well all round, ...
— The Power of Womanhood, or Mothers and Sons - A Book For Parents, And Those In Loco Parentis • Ellice Hopkins
... of the Shinto; let us imagine a great confusion of all the races of the world in which Arabian mullahs, Chinese scholars, Japanese bonzes, Tibetan lamas and Hindu pundits should all be preaching fatalism and {viii} predestination, ancestor-worship and devotion to a deified sovereign, pessimism and deliverance through annihilation—a confusion in which all those priests should erect temples of exotic architecture in our cities and celebrate their disparate rites therein. Such a dream, which ...
— The Oriental Religions in Roman Paganism • Franz Cumont
... country has rejected the long accepted law of a limitation of the wage fund, which led to pessimism and despair because it was the doctrine of perpetual poverty, and has substituted for it the American conception that the only limit to profits and wages is production, which is the doctrine of optimism and hope because it leads ...
— Complete State of the Union Addresses from 1790 to the Present • Various
... value often merely by the caprices of idle plutocrats. It promises a world where all men and women shall be kept sane by work, and where all work shall be of value to the community, not only to a few wealthy vampires. It is to sweep away listlessness and pessimism and weariness and all the complicated miseries of those whose circumstances allow idleness and whose energies are not sufficient to force activity. In place of palaces and hovels, futile vice and useless misery, there is to be wholesome work, enough but not too ...
— The Practice and Theory of Bolshevism • Bertrand Russell
... lesson which Martian civilisation teaches us. Surely it affords no reason for the depression and pessimism in which some upon the earth are so prone to indulge; but rather should it stir them to a more earnest endeavour, by gradually removing the obstacles which now bar their progress, to improve the ...
— To Mars via The Moon - An Astronomical Story • Mark Wicks
... part, though immeasurably preferring the pantheism of Goethe, or of Renan (without his pessimism), to the anthropomorphic God of the Israelites, or of their theosophic legatees, the Christians, however inconsistent, I still believe in prayer. I should not pray that I may not die 'for want of breath'; nor for rain, while 'the wind was in the wrong quarter.' My prayers ...
— Tracks of a Rolling Stone • Henry J. Coke
... understanding with his fellow-creatures was by the exercise of his sense of humor. The circumstances of his life tended to make a pessimist of him. He did not understand the world and was misunderstood in return. To counteract the tendency toward pessimism, his resource was to develop his sense of humor, to create an atmosphere of gayety, by which he was enabled to meet people on a common plane. But not only in the ordinary affairs of life does it stand him in good stead, this sense of humor. It ...
— Beethoven • George Alexander Fischer
... passing over the world in our day a great wave of intellectual and {100} spiritual discouragement and despondency. What with philosophical pessimism and social agitations and literary decadence and political corruption and moral looseness, a great many persons are beginning to feel that the end of the century is an end of faith, and are not able ...
— Mornings in the College Chapel - Short Addresses to Young Men on Personal Religion • Francis Greenwood Peabody
... can speak of the causes and results of Pessimism. It can touch the practical side of the riddle of life by asking certain questions, the answers to which lie within the province of human experience. Among ...
— The Philosophy of Despair • David Starr Jordan
... matter of Enoch Peake's?" he asked, hoping and fearing, really anxious for his son. He defended himself against probable disappointment by preparing to lapse into savage paternal pessimism and disgust at the futility of an offspring nursed ...
— Clayhanger • Arnold Bennett
... without the corrupting appetites of fleshly vitality. In such Materialism as that of Lucretius and Tyndall there is a nobility which produces poetry: John Davidson found his highest inspiration in it. Even its pessimism as it faces the cooling of the sun and the return of the ice-caps does not degrade the pessimist: for example, the Quincy Adamses, with their insistence on modern democratic degradation as an inevitable result of solar shrinkage, are not dehumanized as ...
— Back to Methuselah • George Bernard Shaw
... picturesque cannot hold him for long, nor even the ardours of the chase. Po Chu-i is above all the poet of human love and sorrow, and beyond all the consoler. Those who profess to find pessimism in the Chinese character must leave him alone. At the end of the great tragedy of "The Never-ending Wrong" a whispered message of hope is borne to the lonely soul beating against the confines of the ...
— A Lute of Jade/Being Selections from the Classical Poets of China • L. Cranmer-Byng
... whole is crowned by pure trust and natural confidence in the progress and perfectability of human nature, which he exalts instead of degrading; this he holds to be the foundation stone of society and indeed the very purpose of its existence. His Pessimism resembles far more the optimism which the so-called Books of Moses borrowed from the Ancient Copt than the mournful and melancholy creed of the true Pessimist, as Solomon the Hebrew, the Indian Buddhist and the esoteric European ...
— The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night, Volume 10 • Richard F. Burton
... head, and after sitting for some time in silence, went ashore with the cook and drank himself into a state of hopeless pessimism. In this condition he forgave everybody, and feeling very low, made his will by the simple process of giving his knife to Dick and two and sevenpence to Henry. The trouble he had in revoking it next morning furnished a striking ...
— The Skipper's Wooing, and The Brown Man's Servant • W. W. Jacobs
... amount of right on your side." Tresler felt that this hopeless pessimism was rather the result of drink than natural to him. "But you said you had two things that you ...
— The Night Riders - A Romance of Early Montana • Ridgwell Cullum
... and from Sartor Resartus is beyond a doubt. They were life-long friends and correspondents, and Emerson's Representative Men is, in some sort, a counterpart of Carlyle's Hero Worship. But in temper and style the two writers were widely different. Carlyle's pessimism and {454} dissatisfaction with the general drift of things gained upon him more and more, while Emerson was a consistent optimist to the end. The last of his writings published during his life-time, the Fortune of the Republic, contrasts ...
— Brief History of English and American Literature • Henry A. Beers
... discovered—too late—that it was not worth achieving, his cynicism will assert itself without let or hindrance, and, with his growing incapacity for frivolity, will become harder and bitterer, till at last the dark shadow of incurable pessimism will fall on him and involve his declining years in ever deepening gloom. I do not say that many of our University humanists will conform to this type; but I do say that the type is easily recognisable and is ...
— What Is and What Might Be - A Study of Education in General and Elementary Education in Particular • Edmond Holmes
... impossibility of such union ever becoming permanent; (14) the value of Holy Scripture in daily life; (15) his firm belief in the achievement of England's greatness by means of the open Bible; (16) the note of pessimism in modern life; (17) the necessity for the Church's combating modern pessimism; (18) the Church's position as a purveyor of healthy literature for the young; (19) his reluctance to take up any more of their valuable time, and ...
— Phyllis of Philistia • Frank Frankfort Moore
... question that arises upon experience of death has never been asked with more sincerity and attention than by him. If "In Memoriam" represents the mind of yesterday it represents no less the mind of to-morrow. It is true that pessimism and insurrection in their ignobler forms—nay, in the ignoblest form of a fashion—have, or had but yesterday, the control of the popular pen. Trivial pessimism or trivial optimism, it matters little which prevails. For those who follow the one habit to-day ...
— Hearts of Controversy • Alice Meynell
... ancient proverb, Let sleeping dogs lie, did no more than voice the caution of the street. And he, also, who invented the saying that the world is going to the bow-wows, lodged his deplorable pessimism in fitting words. ...
— There's Pippins And Cheese To Come • Charles S. Brooks
... This time it is no embroidered conceit, but one of those lyrics of pure nature music, of which the Renaissance poets were so lavish, touched with the fire of Spring, with the light of hope, bird-notes untroubled by doubt, unconscious of pessimism, which are therefore all the more charming for us who dwell amid sunsets of intense colouring, who can see nothing but the hectic splendours of autumn. For the melancholy nightingale the poet has surprise and ...
— John Lyly • John Dover Wilson
... tide of devotion brought forth the most influential of the products of all the mystics, the Imitation of Christ by Thomas a Kempis. [Sidenote: Thomas a Kempis, c. 1380-1471] Written in a plaintive minor key of {33} resignation and pessimism, it sets forth with much artless eloquence the ideal of making one's personal life approach that of Christ. Humility, self-restraint, asceticism, patience, solitude, love of Jesus, prayer, and a diligent use of the sacramental ...
— The Age of the Reformation • Preserved Smith
... often blind and unreasoned, is distinctly Western and modern. We do not derive it even from Greece. It comes to us through Christianity and modern science. The absence of any such faith in activity and progress creates the pessimism of the East. Hinduism and Buddhism are alike in their bankruptcy on this side. The majestic religious philosophy of India sees in history only an endless and meaningless repetition. Thucydides and Plato assume the same view, if I mistake not. As Eucken says, 'Ancient views of life bore throughout ...
— The Unity of Civilization • Various
... The hopeless pessimism of the past, that saw in the unmerciful progress of organic evolution no escape for the human animal from the grip of fate, is about to give way to the enthusiasm of ...
— The Cost of Shelter • Ellen H. Richards
... a little, then she said: "I am glad you think me an optimist. It seems to me that healthy human nature revolts from pessimism. The work that lasts is the work that cheers. Give us something with hope in it—something that appeals to the best part of us—something which, while we read, puts us in touch with fine ideals, and makes us feel better ...
— The Beth Book - Being a Study of the Life of Elizabeth Caldwell Maclure, a Woman of Genius • Sarah Grand
... society in America. An excellent antidote to the pessimism of modern writers on our social system.'' ...
— Increasing Efficiency In Business • Walter Dill Scott
... miscalculated her game. Her life was a great failure, and that failure had been brought home to her mind in a mercilessly short space of time; but of what use to bewail it? She was not yet conquered. The bitterness of spirit which she carried about with her took the form of a scoffing pessimism. A hard laugh at the things which made other people shake their heads and uplift their hands; a ready scoff at all tenderness; a sneer at anything which could by any stretch of imagination be called good; a determined running up of what was hard, sordid, and worldly, and ...
— The First Violin - A Novel • Jessie Fothergill
... a third answer would seem the plain one: something between these extremes of optimism and pessimism, a ...
— The Cardinal's Snuff-Box • Henry Harland
... offending constituents or of being lectured in leading articles. Thus their littleness, rather than their greatness, was apt to impress a daily observer like Selwyn, and to give to his remarks an aspect of depreciation and of pessimism. ...
— George Selwyn: His Letters and His Life • E. S. Roscoe and Helen Clergue
... pessimism with a grain of salt. "No one hereabouts seems to think there's any danger of that sort," he said. "I ...
— Roosevelt in the Bad Lands • Hermann Hagedorn
... element in viewing the art of Franck is his remoteness of spirit, the strangeness of his temper. He lacked the joyous spring that is a dominant note in the classic period. Nor on the other hand did his music breathe the pessimism and naturalism that came with the last rebound of Romantic reaction. Rather was his vein one of high spiritual absorption—not so much in recoil, as merely apart from the world in a kind of pious seclusion. Perhaps ...
— Symphonies and Their Meaning; Third Series, Modern Symphonies • Philip H. Goepp
... who has in him the making of a popular scientist, having an easy flow of extemporaneous theory, so that he is never closely confined to his facts. One of his theories is that pessimism is purely a literary disease, and that it can only be conveyed through the printed page. In having a single means of infection it follows the analogy of malaria, which in many respects it resembles. No mosquito, no malaria; so no book, no pessimism. Of ...
— By the Christmas Fire • Samuel McChord Crothers
... either the evolutional or the emotional in agriculture. Is it not probable that a superabundance of emotion would even permit the constitution to wave the bread requirement in the bread-and-water-with-love diet? As a cure for pessimism the emotional tonic is ...
— The Story of the Soil • Cyril G. Hopkins |
