A Quote by James Russell Lowell

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.

James Russell Lowell

Quote Topics

Embryo Evil Full Good Higher Lower Nature Next Reach Stature Text Top

Quote Author

James Russell Lowell
American - Poet
February 22, 1819 - August 12, 1891

What is difficult to understand is that without conscious effort, nothing is possible. Conscious effort is related to higher nature. My lower nature alone cannot lead me to consciousness. It is blind. But when I wake up and I feel that I belong to a higher world, this is only part of conscious effort. I become truly conscious only when I open to all my possibilities, higher and lower. There is value only in conscious effort.

Jeanne de Salzmann

Man has reason, discrimination and free-will such as it is. The brute has no such thing. It is not a free agent, and knows no distinction between virtue and vice, good and evil. Man, being a free agent, knows these distinctions, and when he follows his higher nature, shows himself far superior to the brute, but when he follows his baser nature can show himself lower than the brute.

Mahatma Gandhi

To do evil for good is human corruption; to do good for good is civil retribution; but to do good for evil is Christian perfection. Though this be not the grace of nature, it is the nature of grace.

Thomas Secker

Christ's mission is to release the divine into our conscious knowing. He awakens the impulse in humanity to rise above his lower nature and be aware of his higher nature that dwells within.

Flower A. Newhouse

I want to be a member of the team that helps in any way possible for the evolution of people's souls. Because too much encourages us to spend too much time with our lower nature, and we have a higher nature as well.

Terence Trent D'Arby

It is the nature of the brute to remain where he is (not to progress); it is the nature of man to seek good and avoid evil; it is the nature of God to seek neither, but just to be eternally blissful. Let us be God!

Swami Vivekananda

To refuse any bond of union between man and civil society, on the one hand, and God the Creator and consequently the supreme Law-giver, on the other, is plainly repugnant to the nature, not only of man, but of all created things; for, of necessity, all effects must in some proper way be connected with their cause; and it belongs to the perfection of every nature to contain itself within that sphere and grade which the order of nature has assigned to it, namely, that the lower should be subject and obedient to the higher.

Pope Leo XIII

I must not permit the evil capabilities of human nature to sour my faith in the tremendous good that is possible despite the frailty of that nature.

Mother Angelica

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been know to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Mahatma Gandhi

Man's nature is not essentially evil. Brute nature has been known to yield to the influence of love. You must never despair of human nature.

Mahatma Gandhi

There is no such thing in man's nature as a settled and full resolve either for good or evil, except at the very moment of execution.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

Children are people, and they should have to reach to learn about things, to understand things, just as adults have to reach if they want to grow in mental stature. Life is composed of lights and shadows, and we would be untruthful, insincere, and saccharine if we tried to pretend there were no shadows. Most things are good, and they are the strongest things; but there are evil things too, and you are not doing a child a favor by trying to shield him from reality. The important thing is to teach a child that good can always triumph over evil.

Walt Disney

You are not copying nature, but responding to nature in full awareness, to the way nature expresses itself in that object.

Frederick Franck

If speculation tends thus to a terrific unity, in which all things are absorbed, action tends directly back to diversity. The first is the course or gravitation of mind; the second is the power of nature. Nature is manifold. The unity absorbs, and melts or reduces. Nature opens and creates. These two principles reappear and interpenetrate all things, all thought; the one, the many.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

After decades of faithful study, ecologists have begun to fathom hidden likenesses among many interwoven systems. ...a canon of nature's laws, strategies, and principles... Nature runs on sunlight. Nature uses only the energy it needs. Nature fits form to function. Nature recycles everything. Nature rewards cooperation. Nature banks on diversity. Nature demands local expertise. Nature curbs excesses from within. Nature taps the power of limits.