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" 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

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" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" The ocean moans over dead men's bones. "

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

" What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness. "

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

" 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

" 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

" 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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

" 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

" 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