Top 459 Quotes & Sayings by James Russell Lowell - Page 4

Taste is the next gift to genius.

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

Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many.

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

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

Not a deed would he do, Not a word would he utter, Till he's weighed its relation To plain bread and butter.

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.

Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.

Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern.

In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.

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.

O reputation! dearer far than life.

The purely Great Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere, Thou nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.

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

Freedom needs all her poets; it is they Who give her aspirations wings, And to the wiser law of music sway Her wild imaginings.

Time makes ancient good uncouth.

The green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.

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

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

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.

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

Granting our wish is one of Fate's saddest jokes.

Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.

The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.

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.

True love is but a humble, low born thing, And hath its food served up in earthenware; It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand, Through the every-dayness of this workday world.

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

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.

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.

Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.

The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.

Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.

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.

Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.

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!

What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

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.

No price is set on the lavish summer; June may be had by the poorest comer.

It is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit in Westminster and Washington, or in the editorial rooms of the leading journals,--so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs.

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.

The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

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

Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

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

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

With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.

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.

This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

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.

He's true to God who's true to man.

There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.

Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge.

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.

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

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.

You've gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed; Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.

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.