Top 459 Quotes & Sayings by James Russell Lowell - Page 8

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

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?

There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World moulds aside she threw And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new.

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.

O thou, whose days are yet all spring, Faith, blighted once, is past retrieving; Experience is a dumb, dead thing; The victory's in believing.

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

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 discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.

Evil is a far more cunning and persevering propagandist than good, for it has no inward strength, and is driven to seek countenance and sympathy.

He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

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.

Borrowed garments never keep one warm.

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

Pride and weakness are Siamese twins.

Large charity doth never soil, but only whitens soft white hands.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

All that hath been majestical In life or death, since time began, Is native in the simple heart of all, The angel heat of man.

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

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

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.

While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.

To fail at all is to fail utterly.

Good heavens, of what un costly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.

There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it; the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.

If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.

The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

God'll send the bill to you.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

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.

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, himself, his hungering neighbor and me.

We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.

Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.

Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.

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

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.