Thomas Bailey Aldrich

The ring of a false coin is not more recognizable than that of a rhyme setting forth a simulated sorrow.

It is only your habitual late riser who takes in the full flavor of Nature at those rare intervals when he gets up to go a-fishing. He brings virginal emotions and unsatiated eyes to the sparkling freshness of earth and stream and sky.

The fate of the worm refutes the pretended ethical teaching of the proverb which assumes to illustrate the advantage of early rising and does so by showing how extremely dangerous it is.

Decoration Day is the most beautiful of our national holidays.[…] The grim cannon have turned into palm branches, and the shell and shrapnel into peach blossoms.

To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent—that is to triumph over old age.

What is slang in one age sometimes goes into the vocabulary of the purist in the next.

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

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

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

He has the courage of his conviction and the intolerance of his courage. He is opposed to the death penalty for murder, but he would willingly have anyone electrocuted who disagreed with him on the subject.

There is always a heavy demand for fresh mediocrity. In every generation the least cultivated taste has the largest appetite.

Shakespeare is forever coming into our affairs—putting in his oar, so to speak—with some pat word or sentence.

All the best sands of my life are somehow getting into the wrong end of the hour-glass. If I could only reverse it! Were it in my power to do so, would I?

The laurels of an orator who is not a master of literary art wither quickly.

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

Between the reputation of the author living and the reputation of the same author dead there is ever a wide discrepancy.

The possession of unlimited power will make a despot of almost any man. There is a possible Nero in the gentlest human creature that walks.

Dialect tempered with slang is an admirable medium of communication between persons who have nothing to say and persons who would not care for anything properly said.

The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it. What noble enterprises have been checked and what fine souls have been blighted in the gloom of poverty the world will never know.

Books that have become classics—books that have had their day and now get more praise than perusal—always remind me of venerable colonels and majors and captains who, having reached the age limit, find themselves retired on half pay.

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.

After a debauch of thunder-shower, the weather takes the pledge and signs it with a rainbow.

Humor is a delicate shrub, with the passing hectic flush of its time. The current-topic variety is especially subject to early frosts, as is also the dialectic species.

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