Top 459 Quotes & Sayings by James Russell Lowell - Page 3

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

The flowers or weeds that spring up tomorrow are in the seeds we sow today. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

New occasions teach new duties.

A woman's love Is mighty, but a mother's heart is weak, And by its weakness overcomes.

They have rights who dare maintain them.

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.

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

Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

Idleness induces caprice.

It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong is in their heads.

Silence is sorrow's best food.

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.

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

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

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

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

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

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.

Piety is indifferent whether she enters at the eye or at the ear. There is none of the senses at which she does not knock one day or other. The Puritans forgot this, and thrust Beauty out of the meeting-house and slammed the door in her face.

Stern men with empires in their brains.

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.

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

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.

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

All God's angels come to us disguised.

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

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

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

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.

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!

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.

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!

My soul is not a palace of the past.

The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein.

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

Many make the household but only one the home.

I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.

Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.

Those who love are but one step from heaven.

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

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.

Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.

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.

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.

The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.

There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

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.

The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.

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

They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.

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

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

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train.

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.