James Russell Lowell Quotations | Page 3

That best academy, a mother's knee.

May is a pious fraud of the almanac.

Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.

Wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.

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

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

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

Idleness induces caprice.

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

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.

All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.

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

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

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

The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.

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.

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.

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.

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.

God'll send the bill to you.

A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.

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.

Most long lives resemble those threads of gossamer, the nearest approach to nothing unmeaningly prolonged, scarce visible pathways of some worm from his cradle to his grave.

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.

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.

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.

No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.

Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.

Stern men with empires in their brains.

The pine is the mother of legends.

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.

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.

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.

Ef you want peace, the thing you've gut to du Is jes' to show you're up to fightin', tu.

History is clarified experience.

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.

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.

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

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

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

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.

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.

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.

A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.

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

It is not a great Xerxes army of words, but a compact Greek ten thousand that march safely down to posterity.

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.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.

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.

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.

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.

The realm of death seems an enemy's country to most men, on whose shores they are loathly driven by stress of weather; to the wise man it is the desired port where he moors his bark gladly, as in some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles; it is the golden west into which his sun sinks, and, sinking, casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud-tack which had darkly besieged his day.

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

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.

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

O reputation! dearer far than life.

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.

God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.

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.

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.

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.

To fail at all is to fail utterly.

Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.

And what they dare to dream of, date to do.

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.

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?

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

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

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.

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

Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.

Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

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.

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

The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us.

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

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

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 rich man's sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.

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

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

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

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

Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes.

The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.

Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.

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

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

All birds during the pairing season become more or less sentimental, and murmur soft nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding-organ repetition and loudness of their habitual song. The crow is very comical as a lover; and to hear him trying to soften his croak to the proper Saint-Preux standard has something the effect of a Mississippi boatman quoting Tennyson.

To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.

They have rights who dare maintain them.

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.

Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.

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.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.