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“With the first word I used intelligently, I learned to live, to think, to hope.”
Language is remembered as opening several capacities at once—thought, hope and a fuller experience of living—rather than merely adding a vocabulary item.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. Keller is reflecting on her own early experience of language and education.
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“Life is a boundless privilege.”
The sentence frames existence as abundant possibility rather than mere duration, encouraging attention to what can still be learned, attempted, appreciated, and created.
Source note: The Conduct of Life; Emerson uses the line while describing life as an expanding field of experience rather than a narrowly fixed allotment.
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“Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things.”
James resists treating every possible intellectual mistake as catastrophic, because an excessive fear of error can itself prevent inquiry, experience and the possibility of gaining truth.
Source note: The Will to Believe, essay “The Will to Believe”; Project Gutenberg #26659. James is contrasting the risk of being mistaken with the cost of refusing every uncertain intellectual venture.
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“The optimist has the power of seeing things in their entirety and in their right relations.”
Optimism is defined here as a broader way of interpreting circumstances: the positive outlook is linked to seeing relationships and the whole situation rather than only one discouraging part.
Source note: In Tune with the Infinite, Prelude; Project Gutenberg #23559. The sentence belongs to Trine’s philosophical New Thought contrast between optimist and pessimist and should not be treated as a clinical definition.
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“I declare after all there is no enjoyment like reading!”
Voice: Fictional character · Caroline Bingley
The line is memorable as praise of reading, though its comic context matters because Miss Bingley says it while performing interest for Darcy.
Source note: Pride and Prejudice, Chapter 11; context is ironic.
Source identified
“It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil”
Keller explicitly rejects an optimism that refuses to see harm, making clear-eyed attention to difficult facts part of her constructive outlook.
Source note: Optimism: An Essay (1903), Project Gutenberg #31622. The following paragraph calls ignorant or indifferent optimism dangerous and false.