Thomas Bailey Aldrich

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.

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?

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

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 ocean moans over dead men's bones.

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.

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.