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Updated: June 28, 2025
You find happiness in your own heart, not in worldly possessions.... I am a pessimist. I recognize that life is a miserable thing not only a miserable thing, but a useless thing. We can do no good; there is no good to be done; and life has no advantage except that we can put it off when we will.
The inquiries made by Mr. Turnbull had results so satisfactory that even the resolute pessimist could not but grudgingly admit his inability to discover storm-signals. Though a sense of responsibility made a new element in his life, which would not let him sleep quite so soundly as hitherto, Will persuaded himself that he had but to get to work, and all would be right.
Can he look up at its colossal good without once feeling acquiescence? Can he look up at its colossal evil without once feeling despair? Can he, in short, be at once not only a pessimist and an optimist, but a fanatical pessimist and a fanatical optimist? Is he enough of a pagan to die for the world, and enough of a Christian to die to it?
I submit this fact respectfully to Bernard Shaw, Wall Street, Downing Street and Pennsylvania Avenue, and even to the New York Sun, that vast machine for laughing at a world down in its snug quarters in Park Row that the saint with ruddy cheeks is a totally new and disconcerting fact in our modern life. He is the next fact the honest pessimist will have to face.
Yet Fitzjames's most decided convictions would 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.
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 a saint.
To a future age, seemingly, has been relegated, as an heritage of the past, the best fruit of Beethoven's genius. When the Mass in D and the last Quartets can be heard frequently, a new era in the art will have been inaugurated. It would be a mistake to suppose that Beethoven was a pessimist, or a misanthrope.
"Think!" said Louise, with considerable feeling, "I dare not let myself think, each day brings its own thoughts. Life to me is made up of enigmas and puzzling contradictions, and not being endowed with an extra amount of brain power content myself with the comforting words ''tis folly to be wise." "What shall I call you, Louise, a pessimist?" "For goodness sake! Helen, be moderate.
Pannebakker, I am inclined to exclaim, "Thou almost persuadest me to be a pessimist!" It is unfortunate that our English tongue contains no word that stands somewhere between pessimism and optimism that symbols a judicial cast of mind which sees the Truth without blinking and accepts it without complaint.
One must be a pessimist indeed to feel no exhilaration on coming in contact with such intensity of upward-striving life as meets one on every hand in this league-long island city, stretching oceanward between her eastern Sound and her western estuary, and roofed by a radiant dome of smokeless sky.
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