James Russell Lowell Quotes
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.
There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual
The rich man's sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.
Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.
The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
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.
New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.
What means this glory round our feet, The Magi mused, "more bright than morn!" And voices chanted clear and sweet, "To-day the Prince of Peace is born.
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!
Not a deed would he do, Not a word would he utter, Till he's weighed its relation To plain bread and butter.
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.
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.
'T is heaven alone that is given away; 'T is only God may be had for the asking.
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
Winds wanders, and dews drip earthward; Rains fall, suns rise and set; Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.
Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on.
It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
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.
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.
The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.
In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.
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.
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.
If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
