Words matter. These are the best Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud man.
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.
Civilization is the lamb’s skin in which barbarism masquerades.
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent – that is to triumph over old age.
Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice – to make the average good.
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.
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.
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.
When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!
A man may do worse than make what the world calls a not wholly happy marriage.
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.
The ocean moans over dead men’s bones.
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.
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.
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.
Every man has within himself a gold mine whose riches are limited only by his own industry.
A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
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!
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.
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.
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.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
There is no man at once so unselfish and selfish as a man in love.
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.
In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.
Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.
A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.
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.
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.
I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.
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?
A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.
