Thomas Bailey Aldrich - Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

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

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

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 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 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 laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

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

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich
Great orators who are not also great writers become very indistinct shadows to the generations following them. The spell vanishes with the voice.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich