Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent that is to triumph over old age.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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

Though I be shut in darkness, and become insentient dust blown idly here and there, I count oblivion a scant price to pay for having once had held against my lip life's brimming cup of hydromel and rue--for having once known woman's holy love and a child's kiss, and for a little space been boon companion to the Day and Night, Fed on the odors of the summer dawn, and folded in the beauty of the stars. Dear Lord, though I be changed to senseless clay, and serve the potter as he turns his wheel, I thank Thee for the gracious gift of tears!

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

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

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

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.

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!

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

The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.

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.