Henry Theodore Tuckerman - The Optimist (1850)

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It is amusing to detect character in the vocabulary of each person. The adjectives habitually used, like the inscriptions on a thermometer, indicate the temperament.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Society is too often at war with love. Thousands of human spirits created to assimilate, to afford mutual comfort and inspiration, to interpret each other, and find in sympathy a balm and motive that will render them superior to vicissitude ; thousands of human spirits cross and recross each other's paths, severed by the barriers of vain custom and arbitrary opinion.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
To a nice ear, the quality of a voice is singularly affecting. Its depth seems to be allied to feeling; at least, the contralto notes alone give an adequate sense of pathos. They are born near the heart.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
A pilgrimage is an admirable remedy for over-fastidiousness and sickly refinement.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
There are beauties of character which, like the night-blooming cereus, are closed against the glare and turbulence of every-day life, and bloom only in shade and solitude, and beneath the quiet stars.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
The soul, by an instinct stronger than reason, ever associates beauty with truth.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
It has been said that self-respect is the gate of heaven, and the most cursory observation shows that a degree of reserve adds vastly to the latent force of character.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
There is to the poetical sense a ravishing prophecy and winsome intimation in flowers that now and then, from the influence of mood of circumstance, reasserts itself like the reminiscence of childhood, or the spell of love.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Travel gives a character of experience to our knowledge, and brings the figures on the tablet of memory into strong relief.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
If conversation be an art, like painting, sculpture, and literature, it owes its most power charm to nature; and the least shade of formality or artifice destroys the effect of the best collection of words.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
A work of art is said to be perfect in proportion as it does not remind the spectator of the process by which it was created.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Without the definiteness of sculpture and painting, music is, for that very reason, far more suggestive. Like Milton's Eve, an outline, an impulse, is furnished, and the imagination does the rest.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Whatever is genuine in social relations endures, despite of time, error, absence, and destiny; and that which has no inherent vitality had better die at once. A great poet has truly declared that constancy is no virtue, but a fact.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Fashion seldom interferes with nature without diminishing her grace and efficiency.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Society is the offspring of leisure; and to acquire this forms the only rational motive for accumulating wealth, notwithstanding the cant that prevails on the subject of labor.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Literature is so common a luxury that the age has grown fastidious.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
The art of walking is at once suggestive of the dignity of man. Progressive motion alone implies power, but in almost every other instance it seems a power gained at the expense of self-possession.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
This miserable habit of our times is vividly illustrated by the manner in which those next most sacred things to mortals, books, are treated.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
There are no greater forgers in the universe, than cunning mannerists. Their whole lives are false. The loveliest of human attributes, the beautiful, the winning virtue of sincerity, abides not with them. They have abjured the profession of humanity.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
We discern beyond the smile and the honeyed word, and are sickened at the self-created hollowness of a human heart.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
When the fluid particles composing the primeval earth settled into consistent masses, an unbroken, uniform plain was not the result; but everywhere, form, color, and density indicated the various species of matter. Verdure crept over the rich loam, long tables of sand marked the limits of the sea, and rocks of every hue stood forth from the hills. Form of aspect and movement became a law of creation. Even the unstable elements obeyed it.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Our times might not inaptly be designated as the age of traveling. Its records form no insignificant branch of the literature of the day.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
If the perspective of time were not a necessary condition of romance, the present age would be deemed as fertile in the wonderful as any which have preceded it; but this obvious truth, though sometimes acknowledged, is seldom realized.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
A popular epithet usually goes nearer the truth than we are apt to imagine.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
In social life, there are no characters which are thoroughly satisfactory except those which unite these fundamental traits, for they only can meet the wants of both mind and heart.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
It has been often remarked that earnest men excel in humor, and we perceive how benign is the law which thus tempers elements of fearful intensity.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Humor is doubtless intended as the safety-valve of concentrative minds, and its prevalence, in the English race, is owing to their reserve of character, which finds no vent through a mercurial temperament like the French and Italians.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
It is to be regretted we are so limited in costume. No word is more prevalent than becoming, and no idea more commonly violated. As regards the dress of our own sex, I do not remember to have met a single exception to the feeling of its almost entire deficiency, both in elegance and adaptation.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
One reason why the most famous portraits of the old masters, [...] are so life-like, and inspire so deep a sense of their authenticity, is doubtless that the originals were objects of affection, and familiar by constant association and sympathy, to the minds of the artists.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman
Of Italy:
There they breathe a congenial atmosphere. Often subsisting upon the merest pittance, indulging in every vagary of costume, they
wander over the land and yield themselves freely to the spirit of adventure and the luxury of art.

Henry Theodore Tuckerman