Thomas Bailey Aldrich Quotes

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Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Profession : Poet

Birth : November 11, 1836

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

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

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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!

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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.

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 retired colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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.

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

Thomas Bailey Aldrich