Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.

They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.

And who are you?" cried one agape, Shuddering in the gloaming light. "I know not" said the second Shape, "I only died last night.

I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.

E shall get on famously ... and be capital friends forever.

What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.

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.

We visit...a neighboring grave-yard. I am by this time in a condition of mind to become a willing inmate of the place.

Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.

When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!

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.

Every man has within himself a gold mine whose riches are limited only by his own industry.

The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a false sorrow.

Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

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.

A man may do worse than make what the world calls a not wholly happy marriage.

A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.

A glance, a word
and joy or pain befalls ... How slight the links are in the chain that binds us to our destiny!

Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?

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 ...

To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud man.

Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.

My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.

What probing deep Has ever solved the mystery of sleep?

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.

My mind lets go a thousand things,
Like dates of wars and deaths of kings

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

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.

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.

O harp of life, so speedily unstrung!

There is no man at once so unselfish and selfish as a man in love.

With the tears a Land hath shed. Their graves should ever be green.

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.

The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.

Night is a stealthy, evil Raven, Wrapt to the eyes in his black wings.

It is the Lord's Day, and I do believe that cheerful hearts and faces are not unpleasant in His sight.

What is a day to an immortal soul!
A breath, no more.

We weep when we are born, not when we die!

So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!

Turn on its noiseless hinges, delicate sleep!

A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.

That was indeed to live
at one bold swoop to wrest from darkling death the best that death to life can give.

Hebe's here, May is here!
The air is fresh and sunny;
And the miser-bees are busy
Hoarding golden honey.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

O Liberty ... ! is it well To leave the gates unguarded?

How fugitive and brief is mortal life between the budding and the falling leaf.

It were better to be a soldier's widow than a coward's wife.

The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs
putting in his oar, so to speak
with some pat word or sentence.

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.

Gracious to all, to none subservient, Without offense he spoke the word he meant

There is a special Providence that watches over idiots, drunken men, and boys.

In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.

Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.