Thomas Bailey Aldrich Men Quotations

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

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.

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

It was pleasant to me to get a letter from you the other day. Perhaps I should have found it pleasanter if I had been able to decipher it. I don't think that I mastered anything beyond the date (which I knew) and the signature (which I guessed at). There's a singular and a perpetual charm in a letter of yours; it never grows old, it never loses its novelty .... Other letters are read and thrown away and forgotten, but yours are kept forever - unread. One of them will last a reasonable man a lifetime.

The walking delegates of a higher civilization, who have nothing to divide, look upon the notion of property as a purely artificial creation of human society. According to these advanced philosophers, the time will come when no man shall be allowed to call anything his. The beneficent law which takes away an author's rights in his own books just at the period when old age is creeping upon him seems to me a handsome stride toward the longed-for millennium.

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.

The ocean moans over dead men's bones.

Sorrow itself is not so hard to bear As the thought of sorrow coming. Airy ghosts, That work no harm, do terrify us more Than men in steel with bloody purposes. Death is not dreadful; 'tis the dread of death— We die whene'er we think of it!

The possession of gold has ruined fewer men than the lack of it.

At the beginning of the twentieth century barbarism can throw off its gentle disguise, and burn a man at the stake as complacently as in the Middle Ages.

Wide open and unguarded stand our gates And through them presses a wild motley throng Men from the Volga and the Tartar steppes Featureless figures of the Hoang-Ho Malayan, Scythian, Teuton, Kelt, and Slav Flying the Old World's poverty and scorn These bringing with them unknown gods and rites Those, tiger passions, here to stretch their claws In street and alley what strange tongues are loud Accents of menace alien to our air Voices that once the Tower of Babel knew! O Liberty, white Goddess! Is it well To leave the gates unguarded?

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!

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.