36 quotes
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.
The Optimist (1850)
There is a policy in manner. I have heard one, not inexperienced in the pursuit of fame, give it his earnest support, as being the surest passport to absolute and brilliant success.
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.
The Optimist (1850)
Tact is an essential principle of conversation; hence, the eastern metaphor which likens a word spoken in season, to "apples of gold in pictures of silver." The time and the society must regulate the subject.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
There is more or less of pathos in all true beauty. The delight it awakens has an undefinable and, as it were, luxurious sadness, which is perhaps one element of its might. It may be that this feeling springs from a sense of unattained good, of a perfection of being quite at variance with the present, which the beautiful never fails to suggest.
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.
The Optimist (1850)
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.
The Optimist (1850)
Give me the boon of Love!
I ask no more for Fame;
Far better one unpurchased heart
Than Glory's proudest name.
Why wake a fever in the blood,
Or damp the spirit now,
To gain a wreath whose leaves shall wave
Above a withered brow?
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.
The Optimist (1850)