Top 100 James Russell Lowell Quotes
#1. For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
James Russell Lowell
#2. The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.
James Russell Lowell
#3. With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.
James Russell Lowell
#4. Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
James Russell Lowell
#7. A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?
James Russell Lowell
#8. It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what we call the rights of men become turbulent and dangerous.
James Russell Lowell
#9. Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.
James Russell Lowell
#11. As one lamp lights another, nor grows less,So nobleness enkindleth nobleness.
James Russell Lowell
#12. A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.
James Russell Lowell
#14. The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Lowell
#15. Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
James Russell Lowell
#16. Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.
James Russell Lowell
#20. Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
James Russell Lowell
#21. True love is but a humble, low born thing,
And hath its food served up in earthenware;
It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand,
Through the every-dayness of this workday world.
James Russell Lowell
#22. What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
James Russell Lowell
#23. Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.
James Russell Lowell
#24. No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.
James Russell Lowell
#25. For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.
James Russell Lowell
#26. This child is not mine as the first was; I cannot sing it to rest; I cannot lift it up fatherly, And bless it upon my breast. Yet it lies in my little one's cradle, And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she 's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.
James Russell Lowell
#27. Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.
James Russell Lowell
#31. No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
James Russell Lowell
#32. The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
James Russell Lowell
#33. Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like
A star new-born that drops into its place
And which, once circling in its placid round,
Not all the tumult of the earth can shake.
James Russell Lowell
#35. Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.
James Russell Lowell
#36. Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.
James Russell Lowell
#37. In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.
James Russell Lowell
#39. Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.
James Russell Lowell
#40. An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
James Russell Lowell
#41. Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.
James Russell Lowell
#42. The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great.
James Russell Lowell
#43. It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
James Russell Lowell
#46. Ez fer war, I call it murder,- There you hev it plain an' flat; I don't want to go no furder Than my Testyment fer that ... An' you 've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.
James Russell Lowell
#49. The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.
James Russell Lowell
#50. The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein.
James Russell Lowell
#51. In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science.
James Russell Lowell
#55. Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathways of some worm from his cradle to his grave.
James Russell Lowell
#57. Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.
James Russell Lowell
#58. It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
James Russell Lowell
#61. Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.
James Russell Lowell
#62. The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
James Russell Lowell
#63. Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
James Russell Lowell
#65. Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
James Russell Lowell
#66. The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.
James Russell Lowell
#67. Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.
James Russell Lowell
#68. I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.
James Russell Lowell
#69. If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.
James Russell Lowell
#71. Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.
James Russell Lowell
#72. Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.
James Russell Lowell
#73. A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
James Russell Lowell
#77. He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.
James Russell Lowell
#79. But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.
James Russell Lowell
#80. And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
James Russell Lowell
#81. No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors.
James Russell Lowell
#82. Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen."
James Russell Lowell
#83. The rich man's sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.
James Russell Lowell
#85. Whenever you have the kind of market that is taking shape now - a wildly volatile one with big pricing discrepancies - it plays right into the hands of managers who are very focused on research and stock picking.
James Russell Lowell
#88. Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.
James Russell Lowell
#89. A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.
James Russell Lowell
#91. That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.
James Russell Lowell
#92. God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.
James Russell Lowell
#93. The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.
James Russell Lowell
#94. Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
#97. Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
James Russell Lowell
#98. There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual
James Russell Lowell
#99. A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.
James Russell Lowell
#100. Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.
James Russell Lowell
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