James Russell Lowell quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by James Russell Lowell

James Russell Lowell Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from James Russell Lowell on Wise Famous Quotes.

If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.

I tell ye wut, my judgment is you're pooty sure to fail, Ez long 'z the head keeps turnin' back for counsel to the the tail.

Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.

There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.

Evil is a far more cunning and persevering propagandist than good, for it has no inward strength, and is driven to seek countenance and sympathy.

Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you can't see it - but all the same, it is sixteen pounds to the square inch.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.

The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.

Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

He's true to God who's true to man.

New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth; They must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of truth.

A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity

Freedom needs all her poets; it is they
Who give her aspirations wings,
And to the wiser law of music sway
Her wild imaginings.

It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.

Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge.

And the poorest twig on the elm-tree was ridged inch deep with pearl.

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what we call the rights of men become turbulent and dangerous.

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

He who keeps his faith only, cannot be discrowned.

Of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut

There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.

In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

In creating the only hard thing's to begin

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or by the handle.

We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.

Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.

Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.

A sneer is the weapon of the weak.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.

This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur.

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

But better far it is to speak
One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak
And friendless sons of men.

My soul is not a palace of the past ...

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

At the devil's booth are all things sold. Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold.

New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.

All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reasoning is.

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.

God is not dumb, that he should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.

Violet! sweet violet! Thine eyes are full of tears; Are they wet Even yet With the thought of other years?

Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.

Children are God's Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace.

A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.

That pernicious sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong."

Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

Humbleness is always grace; always dignity

The green grass floweth like a stream
Into the oceans's blue.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.

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.

When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp ...

All that hath been majestical
In life or death, since time began,
Is native in the simple heart of all,
The angel heat of man.

Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.

The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.

He chooses his language for its rich canorousness rather than for intensity of meaning.

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

'T is heaven alone that is given away; 'T is only God may be had for the asking.

A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.

The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.

Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it; but they are tuned differently in every one of us.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.

Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves.

No price is set on the lavish summer;
June may be had by the poorest comer.

Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze ...

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.