James Russell Lowell Quotes

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.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature's text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

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

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

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

And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

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

These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.

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.

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.

Sorrow is the great idealizer.

Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes.

The better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

Large charity doth never soil, but only whitens soft white hands.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.

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

What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many.

We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

In life's small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscle trained; Know'st thou when Fate Thy measure takes, or when she'll say to thee, "I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?"

Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.

There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.

Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

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.

That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

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

It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest.

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.

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