An optimist is a man who--well, take the case of two Irishmen walking along Broadway.
One is an optimist and one is a pessimist, just as one's name is Pat and the other's Mike.
He does, indeed, go further with the common faith than the optimist did.
When, then, the optimist alleges that the process of evolution has been, on the whole, a course of progress, he is but showing that the common faith in the trustworthiness of the reality in which we move and have our being justifies itself.
The attempt made by the optimist to dispense with the testimony of consciousness to the reality of the moral law, and the attempt of the pessimist to dispense with the freedom of the will, were both failures.
It is, however, necessary, in the interests of clearness of thought as well as of the moral and religious consciousness, that the conception of progress thus thoughtlessly emptied of meaning by the optimist should have its context restored.
And who was a greater optimist than your Athenian?
There was a careful shadow or drapery which hid the defects which none of us are without; but defects to the eye of the optimist make beauty more attractive by contrast; in a portrait they may better be hid perhaps.
No doubt, anoptimist will see excellence, beauty, and truth where pessimists see only degradation, vice, and ugliness.
Life was a brilliant drama, a splendid picture, a garden ever fresh and fair; The optimist carries a lamp through dark, social obstructions.
Therefore, we do not hesitate to say that the philosophy, and the creed, and the manners of the optimist are good for society.
Verbally, indeed, Voltaire still makes his bow to the optimist theory, and the two poems appeared together in 1756; but his noble outcry against the empty and complacent deductions which it covers, led to his famous controversy with Rousseau.
But the optimist often gets himself into terrible scrapes, for if he is wrong he cannot say he is glad of it.
When some of the substance it had struck was brought up it looked like French chalk, and my optimist eagerly examined it.
My optimist friend was delighted when he heard of my driven well.
My optimist was dreadfully cast down when he heard that I would drive no deeper.
The next day the optimist came to me, his face fairly blazing with a new idea.
And when you have the optimist and pessimist acutely opposed in a mixing group, they direct lively conversations at one another across the gulf of distance, even of time.
For Victor Radnor and Colney Durance were the Optimist and Pessimist of their society.
To read the two is something like hearing a speech from an optimist landlord and then listening to the comments of Mr. Arch.
It is because the optimist can look at wrong not only with indignation, but with a startled indignation.
The optimist Dickens has achieved more reforms than the pessimist Gissing.
But the optimist sees injustice as something discordant and unexpected, and it stings him into action.
The pessimist can be enraged at wrong; but only the optimist can be surprised at it.
The optimist resents it also, because it is an anomaly; a contradiction to his conception of the course of things.
The true optimist who sees in such things an opportunity for enjoyment is quite as logical and much more sensible than the ordinary "Indignant Ratepayer" who sees in them an opportunity for grumbling.
He deliberately stoked himself from his snuff mull before replying: "Optimist nor pessimist am I, eechie nor ochie.
The difference between the philosophic pessimist and the scientific optimistmay be illustrated by two incidents.
But we recall that Metchnikoff, professed optimist and lover of life, went in 1911 to Manchuria into the center of the bubonic plague in its most virulent form in order to learn how to relieve human suffering.
An optimist is a woman who thinks that everything is for the best, and that she is the best.
An optimist is the fellow who doesn't know what's coming to him.
A political optimistis a fellow who can make sweet, pink lemonade out of the bitter yellow fruit which his opponents hand him.
An optimist is a man who doesn't care what happens just so is doesn't happen to him.
The one question for the would-be optimist is whether humanity is growing nobler, wiser, more unselfish; and of that I have no doubt whatever.
Here and there a stout-hearted optimist appeared among them, but his very cheerfulness seemed to offend.
I am as full of hope and confidence as anybody and I am an optimist if there ever was one, but I don't work on the theory that God takes any better care of an optimist than He does of a pessimist.
In his later period, indeed, he is optimist enough to believe that the sufferings of life cleanse and ennoble.
There is no more detestable sign of literary humbug than the pretence that Browning was an optimist simply because he did not experience sorrow and indigestion as other people do.
Upon which the American professor comments with ingenuous humour of a kind rare in professors in this hemisphere:-- It is pleasant to remember that Emerson, the other great optimist of the century, used to eat pie for breakfast.
Browning was anoptimist only in the sense that he believed in what Stevenson called "the ultimate decency of things," and that he believed in the capacity of the heroic spirit to face any test devised for it by inquisitors or devils.
To belittle him as an optimist is to play the fool with words.
A dyspeptic is usually a pessimist, and an optimist always keeps a bright mood.
The optimist is a benefactor of the race if for no other reason than the sheer contagion of his hopeful spirit; the pessimist contributes neither to the world's welfare nor its happiness.
The optimist retorted by telling the story of a man being carried down to purgatory and the Devil laying his victim up against a bank while he got a drink at a spring--temperature very high.
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.
Though not an optimist in the absurd sense of maintaining that life is all beer and skittles, he did really seem to maintain that beer and skittles are the most serious part of it.
But it is equally true that men flee from the embrace of a great optimist as from the embrace of a bear.
Chapter II The Luggage of an Optimist We all remember the fairy tales of science in our infancy, which played with the supposition that large animals could jump in the proportion of small ones.
The above list will hopefully give you a few useful examples demonstrating the appropriate usage of "optimist" in a variety of sentences. We hope that you will now be able to make sentences using this word. Other words: aspirant; hopeful; millenarian; optimist; perfectionist
