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.
— Thomas Bailey Aldrich
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.
Every man has within himself a gold mine whose riches are limited only by his own industry.
When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!
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.
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 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?
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.
A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.
A man may do worse than make what the world calls a not wholly happy marriage.
To be weak, and to know it, is something of a punishment for a proud man.
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 keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.
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.
Painfully to attain possession of what we do not want, and then painfully to waste our days in attempting to rid ourselves of it, seems to be a part of our discipline here below.
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.
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.
Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?
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.
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.
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.
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.
There is no man at once so unselfish and selfish as a man in love.
Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.
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!
True art selects and paraphrases, but seldom gives a verbatim translation.
What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness.
Civilization is the lamb's skin in which barbarism masquerades.
A man is known by the company his mind keeps.
I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.
There is a special Providence that watches over idiots, drunken men, and boys.
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.
Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.
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.
If you chance to live in a town where the authorities cannot rest until they have destroyed every precious tree within their blighting reach, you will be especially charmed by the beauty of the streets of Portsmouth.
Nothing except time is wasted in Italy.
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.
A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.
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.
In every age have mighty spirits dwelt unseen with man, biding the hour that needed them.
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.
The ocean moans over dead men's bones.
The man who suspects his own tediousness is yet to be born.
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.
