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Updated: June 28, 2025
The ``National, where we were living, was esteemed the best hotel, and it was abominable. Just before we arrived, what was known as the ``National Hotel Disease'' had broken out in it; by some imputed to an attempt to poison the incoming President, in order to bring the Vice-President into his place. But that was the mere wild surmise of a political pessimist.
If we refused to study the bad side of life, no evil would ever be remedied." "Do you think any good is ever done?" she asked. "I am afraid you are a pessimist," I rejoined. "But do you really like books that are true to life yourself?" she proceeded. "Don't you think we see enough of life without reading about it?
It is a part of the stock in trade of every great novelist; Fielding, Thackeray, George Eliot, Walter Scott. It frequently comes to the surface in Schopenhauer pessimist though he be; it pervades Shakespeare. Few men regarded life with greater seriousness than Thoreau, but humor sparkles all over his works. It is only where this is in excess that it detracts from the value of the work.
There will always be jealousies through the unequal gifts of nature and of fortune; interests will never cease to clash and hatred to ensue; "painful labour, daily subjection, a condition nearly allied to indigence, will always be the lot of numbers"; in art and poetry the sources of novelty will probably be exhausted. But Bentham was far from being a pessimist.
Some four years later, the Times contained the bare news, in the obituary column, of his wife's death, and about a year afterwards he returned to England, an enormously changed man, with that slight lameness, which seemed somehow to draw a sharp, dividing line between the splendid, impulsive youth who had gone abroad, and the reserved, and self-contained man of thirty-two pessimist and dilettante who had returned.
But if life is evil, one of its few redeeming features should be its brevity; the pessimist should look forward to death as a man in prison looks toward the day of his release. Yet this attitude toward death is almost never taken by the atheists or the pessimists, while it is the burden of many of the triumphant hymns of the Christian Church.
"Pessimist!" was the angry retort. "I'll just ask you one question, my son. Where's Downs?" "I certainly think," Crawshay admitted, "that under the circumstances he might have been at the station to meet us." "He wouldn't even talk through the 'phone," Hobson pointed out. "I had to explain who we were to one of his inspectors. No one seemed to know a goldarned thing about us."
Lauder's scones. There's round hole in the middle of a doughnut, always. And the Americans have a way of saying: "The optimist sees the doughnut; the pessimist sees the hole." It's a wise crack, you, and it tells you a good deal, if you'll apply it. There's another way we maun be thinking. We've spent a deal of blood and siller in these last years.
The word Pessimist was first flung in contempt at those who dared to express unpalatable truth. It is now accepted by a large number of intellectuals, and if to be a pessimist is to have insight, wit, calm courage, patience, persistency, and a disposition that accepts all Fate sends and makes the best of it, then pity 'tis we haven't more.
Do you remember telling me that death was sometimes a pleasant thing, but that life after failure was Hell itself?" Rochester nodded. "I always had such a clear insight into life," he murmured. "I was perfectly right." "From your point of view you doubtless were," Saton answered. "You were a cynic and a pessimist, and I find you now unchanged. I went away with your words ringing in my brain.
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