Quotes from Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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.

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.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

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

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.

My father invested his money so securely in the banking business that he was never able to get any of it out again.

After a debauch of thundershower the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

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 sowould I?

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

When Washington visited Portsmouth in 1789, he was not much impressed by the architecture of the little town that had stood by him so stoutly in the struggle for independence.

Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.

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

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

What is newest to one in foreign countries is not always the people, but their surroundings, and those same little details of life and circumstance which make no impression on a man in his own land until he returns to it after a prolonged absence, and then they stand out very sharply for a while.

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

To live in Portsmouth without possessing a family portrait done by Copley is like living in Boston without having an ancestor in the old Granary Burying-Ground. You can exist, but you cannot be said to flourish.

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.

This one sits shivering in Fortune's smile, taking his joy with bated, doubtful breath. This other, gnawed by hunger, all the while laughs in the teeth of Death.

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

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

Everywhere on the Continent, the tourist is looked upon as a bird to be plucked, and presently the bird himself feebly comes to regard plucking as his proper destiny and abjectly holds out his wing so long as there is a feather left on it.

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.

So precious life is! Even to the old, the hours are as a miser's coins!

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