James Russell Lowell quotes:

Send

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.
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.
Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.
Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.
Children are God's Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace.
A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.
Fate loves the fearless.
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.
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
The eye is the notebook of the poet.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.
Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.
Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then
When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp...
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
Communism means barbarism.
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
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.
Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
Silence is sorrow's best food.
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.
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.
The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.
Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.
Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
O chime of sweet Saint Charity, Peal soon that Easter morn When Christ for all shall risen be, And in all hearts new-born! That Pentecost when utterance clear To all men shall be given, When all shall say My Brother here, And hear My Son in heaven!
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.
How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.
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 right to be a cussed fool Is safe from all devices human, It's common (ez a gin'I rule) To every critter born of woman.
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
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.
The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.
Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.
Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.
It ["The Ancient Mariner"] is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.
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
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
And the poorest twig on the elm-tree was ridged inch deep with pearl.
Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn.
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.
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!
Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.
Tiny Salmoneus of the air His mimic bolts the firefly threw.
The fireflies o'er the meadow In pulses come and go.
Against the windows the storm comes dashing, Through tattered foliage the hail tears crashing, The blue lightning flashes, The rapid hail clashes... The thunder is rumbling And crashing and crumbling...
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.
Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.
The gift without the giver is rare.
AND what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days; Then Heaven tries earth if it be in tune, And over it softly her warm ear lays; Whether we look, or whether we listen, We hear life murmur, or see it glisten;
The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.
This child is not mine as the first was; I cannot sing it to rest; I cannot lift it up fatherly, And bless it upon my breast. Yet it lies in my little one's cradle, And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she 's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.
My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 't is to crow: Don't never prophesy - onless ye know.
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
The green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.
Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!
The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.
And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.
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.
No price is set on the lavish summer; June may be had by the poorest comer.
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.
If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train.
Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.
May is a pious fraud of the almanac.
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.
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?
A woman's love Is mighty, but a mother's heart is weak, And by its weakness overcomes.
Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.
For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.
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.
For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.
He who esteems the Virginia reel A bait to draw saints from their spiritual weal, And regards the quadrille as a far greater knavery Than crushing His African children with slavery, Since all who take part in a waltz or cotillon Are mounted for hell on the devil's own pillion, Who, as every true orthodox Christian well knows, Approaches the heart through the door of the toes.
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 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.
Get but the truth once uttered, and 'tis like A star new-born that drops into its place And which, once circling in its placid round, Not all the tumult of the earth can shake.
Dear common flower, that grow'st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.
Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.
What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.
Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
The New World's sons from England's breast we drew Such milk as bids remember whence we came, Proud of her past wherefrom our future grew, This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame.
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.
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.
Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.
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
Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts
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
There is no good in arguing with the inevitable The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat

Send