What is lovely never dies, But passes into other loveliness.Collection: Sympathy
To keep the heart unwrinkled, to be hopeful, kindly, cheerful, reverent - that is to triumph over old age.Collection: Age
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.Collection: Architecture
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.Collection: Imagination
A girl does not treat a possible lover with unvarying simplicity and directness. In all its phases, love is complex; friendship is not.Collection: Friendship
They fail, and they alone, who have not striven.Collection: Alone
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.
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.
Everyone ought to wish to marry; some ought to be allowed to marry; and others ought to marry twice - to make the average good.
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.
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.
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!
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.
A man should have duties outside of himself; without them, he is a mere balloon, inflated with thin egotism and drifting nowhere.
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.
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.
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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Slavery in New Hampshire was never legally abolished, unless Abraham Lincoln did it. The State itself has not ever pronounced any emancipation edict.
Conservatism and respectability have their values, certainly; but has not the unconventional its values also?
When a man cuts himself absolutely adrift from custom, what an astonishingly light spar floats him! How few his wants are, after all!
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.
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.
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.
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.
I have frequently noticed how circumstances conspire to help a man, or a boy, when he has thoroughly resolved on doing a thing.
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.
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.
What is lovely never dies, but passes into other loveliness, Star-dust, or sea-foam, flower or winged air.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Teaching
The fanatic 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.Collection: Death Penalty
The thing one reads and likes, and then forgets, is of no account. The thing that stays, and haunts one, and refuses to be forgotten, that is the sincere thing.Collection: Book