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Quotes from Ponkapog Papers — Thomas Bailey Aldrich

1836–1907 United States

← All quotes by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

24 quotes

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

A man is known by the company his mind keeps.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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?

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

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.

Ponkapog Papers (1903)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Thomas Bailey Aldrich (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.