Top 99 Thomas Aldrich Quotes
#1. Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#3. To the mass of mankind - meaning also womankind - marriage may be the only possible thing; but to the individual, it may be the one thing impossible.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#4. Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays ... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#5. It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#6. I never witness a performance of child-acrobats, or the exhibition of any forced talent, physical or mental, on the part of children, without protesting, at least in my own mind, against the blindness and cruelty of their parents or guardians or whoever has care of them.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#7. The dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrimage.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#9. Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#11. Every man has within himself a gold mine whose riches are limited only by his own industry.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#12. It is a great mistake on the part of elderly ladies, male and female, to tell a child that he is seeing his happiest days. Do not you believe a word of it, my little friend.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#13. Famous old houses seem to have an intuitive perception of the value of corner lots. If it is a possible thing, they always set themselves down on the most desirable spots.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#14. The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#16. That was indeed to live
at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#17. Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#19. Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse - though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#20. The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of November. On the previous morning, the 'New Hampshire Gazette' appeared with a deep black border and all the typographical emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty dead?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#21. I beg you come tonight and dine
A welcome waits you and sound wine
The Roederer chilly to a charm
As Juno's breasts the claret warm ...
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#22. The young girl in my story is to be as sensitive to praise as a prism is to light. Whenever anybody praises her she breaks into colors.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#23. Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#24. Dwellers by the sea are generally superstitious; sailors always are. There is something in the illimitable expanse of sky and water that dilates the imagination.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#25. The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#26. Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#28. So I sit there kicked my heels, thinking about New Orleans, and watching a morbid blue-bottle fly attempt to commit suicide by butting his head against the windowpane.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#30. Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#32. Day is a snow-white Dove of heaven That from the East glad message brings. Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapped to the eyes in his black wings.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#33. Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#34. When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#35. Everywhere on the Continent, the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#37. After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#38. The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#39. A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#40. The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#41. Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#42. Daily contact with boys who had not been brought up as gently as I worked an immediate and, in some respects, a beneficial change in my character.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#43. To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#44. Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#45. Everyone has a bookplate these days, and the collectors are after it. The fool and his bookplate are soon parted. To distribute one's ex libris is inanely to destroy the only significance it has, that of indicating the past or present ownership of the volume in which it is placed.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#46. October turned my maple's leaves to gold; The most are gone now; here and there one lingers: Soon these will slip from the twigs' weak hold, Like coins between a dying miser's fingers.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#47. I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#48. Books that have become classics - books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal - always remind me of retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#50. The burdens of childhood are as hard to bear as the crosses that weigh us down later in life, while the happinesses of childhood are tame compared with those of our maturer years.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#52. O Liberty, white Goddess! is it well to leave the gates unguarded? On thy breast fold Sorrow's children, soothe the hurts of Fate, lift the down-trodden, but with hand of steel stay those who to thy sacred portals come to waste the gifts of Freedom.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#53. A habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is led - with what silken threads and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by, the soft silk threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#54. Hebe's here, May is here!
The air is fresh and sunny;
And the miser-bees are busy
Hoarding golden honey.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#55. When friends are at your hearthside met, Sweet courtesy has done its most If you have made each guest forget That he himself is not the host.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#57. Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#59. The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb, which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#60. A man may do worse than make what the world calls a not wholly happy marriage.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#61. When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#62. A glance, a word
and joy or pain befalls ... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#64. I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow; I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Eastern lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#65. A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#66. What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#67. My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#68. The ability to have our own way, and at the same time convince others they are having their own way, is a rare thing among men. Among women it is as common as eyebrows.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#69. Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs
putting in his oar, so to speak
with some pat word or sentence.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#72. Come watch with me the shaft of fire that glows in yonder West; the fair, frail palaces, The fading Alps and archipelagoes and great cloud continents of sunset-seas.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#74. No bird has ever uttered note That was not in some first bird's throat; Since Eden's freshness and man's fall No rose has been original.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#75. All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do sowould I?
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#77. Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#78. Painfully to attain possession of what we do not want, and then painfully to waste our days in attempting to rid ourselves of it, seems to be a part of our discipline here below.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#79. Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#80. We visit...a neighboring grave-yard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#82. There must be such a thing as a child with average ability, but you can't find a parent who will admit that it is his child.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#83. In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#84. I like to have a thing suggested rather than told in full. When every detail is given, the mind rests satisfied, and the imagination loses the desire to use its own wings.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#85. I knew I was born at the North but hoped nobody would find it out. I looked upon the misfortune as something so shrouded by time and distance that maybe nobody remembered it.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#86. It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go afishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#87. This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#89. What is newest to one in foreign countries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#90. What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#92. And who are you?" cried one agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. "I know not" said the second Shape, "I only died last night.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#94. We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed
The white of their leaves, the amber grain
Shrunk in the wind,-and the lightning now
Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#96. Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death - We die whene'er we think of it!
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#97. If you chance to live in a town where the authorities cannot rest until they have destroyed every precious tree within their blighting reach, you will be especially charmed by the beauty of the streets of Portsmouth.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#98. How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
#99. The fanatic has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.
Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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