James Russell Lowell Quotes

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

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.

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

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reasoning is.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

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.

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.

One of the things particularly admirable in the public utterances of President Lincoln is a certain tone of familiar dignity, which, while it is perhaps the most difficult attainment of mere style, is also no doubtful indication of personal character. There must be something essentially noble in an elective ruler who can descend to the level of confidential ease without forfeiting respect, something very manly in one who can break through the etiquette of his conventional rank and trust himself to the reason and intelligence of those who have elected him.

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

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

There was no beauty of the wood or field
But she its fragrant bosom-secret knew,
Nor any but to her would freely yield
Some grace that in her soul took root and grew;
Nature to her shone as but now revealed,
All rosy-fresh with innocent morning dew,
And looked into her heart with dim, sweet eyes
That left it full of sylvan memories.

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.

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

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

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.

Those who love are but one step from heaven.

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

Endurance is the crowning quality ...

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.

Taste is the next gift to genius.

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.

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

Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.

Good heavens, of what un costly material is our earthly happiness composed ... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

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.

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

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

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

Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But surely God endures forever!

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

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.

Under the influence of a political framework like our own. We

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

Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.

Pride and weakness are Siamese twins.

The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.

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

A wise man travels to discover himself.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, - they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

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

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

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.

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

There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.

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

The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.

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.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever twixt that darkness and that light.

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

His heart kep' goin' pity-pat, But hern went pity-Zekle.

Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.

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

Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it

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

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

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.

How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.

Not as all other women are
Is she that to my soul is dear;
Her glorious fancies come from far,
Beneath the silver evening star,
And yet her heart is ever near.

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

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

The question of common sense is always: 'what is it good for?' -
a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

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

While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.

Stern men with empires in their brains.

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

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.

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.

History is clarified experience.

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

Tis easy now for the heart to be true As for grass to be green or skies to be blue
'Tis the natural way of living.

Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.

'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.

So we're all right, an' I, for one, Don't think our cause'll lose in vally By rammin' Scriptur' in our gun, An' gittin' Natur' for an ally.

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.

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

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

But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet. Lessen like sound of friends departing feet; And death is beautiful as feet of friend. Coming with welcome at our journey's end.

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

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

Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

It is good To lengthen to the last a sunny mood.

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

The idol is the measure of the worshipper.

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