James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

As life runs on, the road grows strange
With faces new, and near the end
The milestones into headstones change,
'Neath every one a friend.

James Russell Lowell
There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

James Russell Lowell
Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

James Russell Lowell
An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

James Russell Lowell
Blessed are they who have nothing to say, and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

James Russell Lowell
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

James Russell Lowell
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.

James Russell Lowell
A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.

James Russell Lowell
Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

James Russell Lowell
New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.

James Russell Lowell
The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.

James Russell Lowell
A beggar through the world am I, From place to place I wander by. Fill up my pilgrim's scrip for me, For Christ's sweet sake and charity.

James Russell Lowell
God's livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan's, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.

James Russell Lowell
What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

James Russell Lowell
Over our manhood bend the skies; Against our fallen and traitor lives The great winds utter prophecies; With our faint hearts the mountain strives, Its arms outstretched, the druid wood Waits with its benedicite And to our age’s drowsy blood Still shouts the inspiring sea.

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
And each glad, obedient planet like a golden shuttle sings Through the web which Time is weaving in his never-resting loom

James Russell Lowell
Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining.

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

James Russell Lowell
It is right precious to behold
The first long surf of climbing light
Flood all the thirsty east with gold.

James Russell Lowell
Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

James Russell Lowell
May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind.

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.

James Russell Lowell
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

James Russell Lowell
Most brains reflect but the crown of a hat.

James Russell Lowell