Thomas Bailey Aldrich

“Painfully to attain possession of what we do not want, and then painfully to waste our days in attempting to rid ourselves of it, seems to be a part of our discipline here below.”

“It is a great mistake on the part of elderly ladies, male and female, to tell a child that he is seeing his happiest days. Do not you believe a word of it, my little friend.”

“Dwellers by the sea are generally superstitious; sailors always are. There is something in the illimitable expanse of sky and water that dilates the imagination.”

“A man is known by the company his mind keeps.”

“A habit leads a man so gently in the beginning that he does not perceive he is led - with what silken threads and down what pleasant avenues it leads him! By and by, the soft silk threads become iron chains, and the pleasant avenues Avernus!”

“There must be such a thing as a child with average ability, but you can't find a parent who will admit that it is his child.”

“Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.”

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

“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.”

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

“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!”

“There is no man at once so unselfish and selfish as a man in love.”

“I never witness a performance of child-acrobats, or the exhibition of any forced talent, physical or mental, on the part of children, without protesting, at least in my own mind, against the blindness and cruelty of their parents or guardians or whoever has care of them.”

“The dead play a very prominent part in the experience of the wanderer abroad. The houses in which they were born, the tombs in which they lie, the localities they made famous by their good or evil deeds, and the works their genius left behind them are necessarily the chief shrines of his pilgrimage.”

“Rome is one enormous mausoleum. There, the Past lies visibly stretched upon his bier. There is no today or tomorrow in Rome; it is perpetual yesterday.”

“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.”

“Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.”

“In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.”

“Daily contact with boys who had not been brought up as gently as I worked an immediate and, in some respects, a beneficial change in my character.”

“A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.”