James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

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

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

James Russell Lowell
Is true Freedom but to break
Fetters for our own dear sake,
And, with leathern hearts, forget
That we owe mankind a debt? No! true freedom is to share
All the chains our brothers wear,
And, with heart and hand, to be
Earnest to make others free!

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

James Russell Lowell
Violet! sweet violet! Thine eyes are full of tears; Are they wet Even yet With the thought of other years?

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

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.

James Russell Lowell
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.

James Russell Lowell
These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred,
Each softly lucent as a rounded moon;
The diver Omar plucked them from their bed,
Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.

James Russell Lowell
Soft-heartedness, in times like these,
Shows sof'ness in the upper story.

James Russell Lowell
Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.

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

James Russell Lowell
To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.

James Russell Lowell
I du believe with all my soul
In the gret Press's freedom,
To pint the people to the goal
An' in the traces lead 'em.

James Russell Lowell
There's nothing we read of in torture's inventions
Like a well-meaning dunce with the best of intentions.

James Russell Lowell
His words were simple words enough,
And yet he used them so,
That what in other mouths was rough
In his seemed musical and low.

James Russell Lowell