Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!”

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

“The Stamp Act was to go into operation on the first day of November. On the previous morning, the 'New Hampshire Gazette' appeared with a deep black border and all the typographical emblems of affliction, for was not Liberty dead?”

“There is a special Providence that watches over idiots, drunken men, and boys.”

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

“The ocean moans over dead men's bones.”

“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.”

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

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

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

“I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

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

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

“Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.”

“Portsmouth has the honor, I believe, of establishing the first recorded pauper workhouse - though not in connection with her poets, as might naturally be supposed.”