James Russell Lowell Quotes
-
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!
-
The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.
-
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.
-
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
-
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.
-
Nature, they say, doth dote,And cannot make a manSave on some worn-out plan,Repeating us by rote.
-
The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
-
The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accursed;Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,Than to be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!
-
Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
-
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
-
He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
-
You've gut to git up airlyEf you want to take in God.
-
There is no better ballast for keeping the mind steady on its keel, and saving it from all risk of crankiness, than business.
-
The thing we long for, that we areFor one transcendent moment.
-
Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.
-
A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
-
There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
-
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.
-
Soft-heartedness, in times like these,Shows sof'ness in the upper story.
-
And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.
-
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?
-
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.
-
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.
-
Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.