Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

64 Sourced Quotes

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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go afishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

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
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
All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hourglass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

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
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
Up from the dark the moon begins to creep; and now a pallid, haggard face lifts she above the water-line: thus from the deep a drowned body rises solemnly.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Nature, who loves to do a gentle thing even in her most savage moods, had taken one of those empty water-courses and filled it from end to end with forget-me-nots.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.

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
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
Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
I like not lady-slippers, Nor yet the sweet-pea blossoms, Nor yet the flaky roses, Red or white as snow; I like the chaliced lilies, The heavy Eastern lilies, The gorgeous tiger-lilies, That in our garden grow.

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Though I am not genuine Boston, I am Boston-plated.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.... The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.

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

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