James Russell Lowell Quotes

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

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.

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.

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.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer.

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train.

Idleness induces caprice.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

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

And what they dare to dream of, date to do.

Did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive?

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.

Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.

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.

The one thing finished in this hasty world.

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.

True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

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

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

Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.

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.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

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

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.

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.

Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.

The idol is the measure of the worshipper.

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

The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us.

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.

Earth's noblest thing,-a woman perfected.

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?

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.

'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True it is that Death's face seems stern and cold When he is sent to summon those we love; But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after another, lift their frowning masks, And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the Glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God.

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

All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.

What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.

The nunneries of silent nooks, the murmured longing of the wood.

Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

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.

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.