James Russell Lowell Quotes

They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.

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

Idleness induces caprice.

Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.

Beauty hath no true glass, except it be in the sweet privacy of loving eyes.

A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.

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.

My soul is not a palace of the past.

Silence is sorrow's best food.

It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.

But civlyzation doos git forrid Sometimes upon a powder-cart.

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

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.

Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is subjected to chemical tests.

Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.

What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.

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

Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.

Many make the household but only one the home.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer.

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

A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.

The nunneries of silent nooks, the murmured longing of the wood.

Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves.

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

Let us be thankful that there is no court by which we can be excluded from our share in the inheritance of the great poets of all ages and countries, to which our simple humanity entitles us.

I tell ye wut, my judgment is you're pooty sure to fail, Ez long 'z the head keeps turnin' back for counsel to the the tail.

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.

Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.

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.

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.

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

I love her with a love as still As a broad river's peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright.

The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.

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

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.

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.

Borrowed garments never keep one warm.

Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is...

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.

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.

Though old the thought and oft exprest, Tis his at last who says it best.

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