James Russell Lowell Quotes
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Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
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Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
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A reading-machine, always wound up and going,He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
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Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
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He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
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In vain we call old notions fudge,And bend our conscience to our dealing;The Ten Commandments will not budge,And stealing will continue stealing.
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The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.
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Light is the symbol of truth.
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They come transfigured back,Secure from change in their high-hearted ways,Beautiful evermore, and with the raysOf morn on their white Shields of Expectation!
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The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
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You've gut to git up airlyEf you want to take in God.
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Gineral C. is a dreffle smart man;He’s ben on all sides thet give places or pelf;But consistency still wuz a part of his plan,-He’s ben true to one party, an’ thet is himself.
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The child is not mine as the first was,I cannot sing it to rest,I cannot lift it up fatherlyAnd bliss it upon my breast;Yet it lies in my little one's cradleAnd sits in my little one's chair,And the light of the heaven she's gone toTransfigures its golden hair.
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Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
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The little that we doIs but half-nobly true;With our laborious hivingWhat men call treasure, and the gods call dross,Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving,Only secure in every one's conniving,A long account of nothings paid with loss.
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Ye come and go incessant; we remainSafe in the hallowed quiets of the past;Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,Of faith so nobly realized as this.
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The question of common sense is always 'What is it good for?'—a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.
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Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
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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.
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A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
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Nature, they say, doth dote,And cannot make a manSave on some worn-out plan,Repeating us by rote.
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Our slender life runs rippling by, and glidesInto the silent hollow of the past;What is there that abidesTo make the next age better for the last?
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Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.
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The thing we long for, that we areFor one transcendent moment.