James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

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

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
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.

James Russell Lowell
Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, —
One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

James Russell Lowell
If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

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

James Russell Lowell
An angel stood and met my gaze, Through the low doorway of my tent; The tent is struck, the vision stays; I only know she came and went.

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
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.

James Russell Lowell
In the scales of the destinies brawn will never weigh so much as brain. Our healing is not in the storm or in the whirlwind, it is not in monarchies, or aristocracies, or democracies, but will be revealed by the still small voice that speaks to the conscience and the heart, prompting us to a wider and wiser humanity.

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
Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.

James Russell Lowell
The English Puritans pulled down church and state to rebuild Zion on the ruins, and all the while it was not Zion, but America, they were building.

James Russell Lowell
Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,—
Yet that scaffold sways the future, and, behind the dim unknown,
Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

James Russell Lowell
One day with life and heart
Is more than time enough to find a world.

James Russell Lowell
Our papers don't purtend to print on'y wut Guv'ment choose,
An' thet insures us all to git the very best o' noose.

James Russell Lowell
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

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
Though old the thought and oft expressed,
'Tis his at last who says it best.

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

James Russell Lowell