Get QuoteDark Inspirational Quotes App

All Quotes by author - Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

" 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! "

" A man is known by the company his mind keeps. "

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

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

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

" Nothing except time is wasted in Italy. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

" 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. "

" 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. "

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

Check our other websites: