Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
In scarlet clusters o'er the grey stone-wall The barberries lean in thin autumnal air: Just when the fields and garden-plots are bare, And ere the green leaf takes the tint of fall, They come to make the eye a festival! Along the road, for miles, their torches flare.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What is more cheerful, now, in the fall of the year, than an open-wood-fire? Do you hear those little chirps and twitters coming out of that piece of apple-wood? Those are the ghosts of the robins and blue-birds that sang upon the bough when it was in blossom last Spring. In Summer whole flocks of them come fluttering about the fruit-trees under the window: so I have singing birds all the year round.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
If my best wines mislike thy taste,
And my best service win thy frown,
Then tarry not, I bid thee haste;
There's many another Inn in town.

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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Great thoughts in crude, unshapely verse set forth lose half their preciousness, and ever must, unless the diamond with its own rich dust be cut and polished, it seems little worth.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
What thought is folded in thy leaves!
What tender thought, what speechless pain!
I hold thy faded lips to mine,
Thou darling of the April rain.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

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
Black Tragedy lets slip her grim disguise and shows you laughing lips and roguish eyes; but when, unmasked, gay Comedy appears, how wan her cheeks are, and what heavy tears!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
So precious life is! Even to the old
The hours are as a miser's coins!

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 venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired upon half pay.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
We knew it would rain, for the poplars showed
The white of their leaves, the amber grain
Shrunk in the wind, — and the lightning now
Is tangled in tremulous skeins of rain.

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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
In her eyes a thought
Grew sweeter and sweeter, deepening like the dawn, —
A mystical forewarning.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Imagine all human beings swept off the face of the earth, excepting one man. Imagine this man in some vast city, New York or London. Imagine him on the third or fourth day of his solitude sitting in a house and hearing a ring at the door-bell!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
When I behold what pleasure is pursuit,
What life, what glorious eagerness it is,
Then mark how full possession falls from this,
How fairer seems the blossom than the fruit, —
I am perplext, and often stricken mute,
Wondering which attained the higher bliss,
The winged insect, or the chrysalis
It thrust aside with unreluctant foot.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich