James Russell Lowell Quotes

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

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

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.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.

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

Every person born into this world their work is born with them.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.

Those who love are but one step from heaven.

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

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.

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.

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

Over our manhood bend the skies; Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our age’s drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.

Laborin' man an' laborin' woman Hev one glory an' one shame; Ev'y thin' thet' s done inhuman Injers all on 'em the same.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.

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

In the scale of the destinies, brawn will never weigh so mach as brain.

Take winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow; with no nonsense in him, which is a great comfort in the long-run.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.

The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

[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.

Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the surrender.

I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.

Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,--the human soul!

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

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

The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.

If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, - and that is a book honestly come by.

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

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still.

The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.

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

Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.

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.

Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?

What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.

All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.

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.

To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.

The discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.

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.

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous.