James Russell Lowell Quotes

All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion ; and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.

Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

God's livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.

I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.

There is a law of neutralization of forces, which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

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

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.

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.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

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.

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

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.

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?

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.

The greater your real strength and power, the quieter it will be exercised.

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.

If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.

God does not weigh criminality in our scales. We have one absolute, with the seal of authority upon it; and with us an ounce is an ounce, and a pound a pound. God's measure is the heart of the offender,--a balance which varies with every one of us, a balance so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may make the weight of error kick the beam.

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.

It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

All God's angels come to us disguised.

The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

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

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

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

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

Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.

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

Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

Taste is the next gift to genius.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.

To genius life never grows commonplace.

No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work with, for those who will, and blessed are the horny hands of toil. The busy world shoves angrily aside the man who stands with arms akimbo until occasion tells him what to do; and he who waits to have his task marked out shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.