James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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
One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.

James Russell Lowell
I know a falcon swift and peerless As e'er was cradled in the pine: No bird had ever eye so fearless, Or wing so strong as this of mine.

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
It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

James Russell Lowell
It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

James Russell Lowell
Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.

James Russell Lowell
Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it-have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.

James Russell Lowell
In the storm, like a prophet o'ermaddened, Thou singest and tossest thy branches; Thy heart with the terror is gladdened, Thou forebodest the dread avalanches.... In the calm thou o'erstretchest the valleys With thine arms, as if blessings imploring, Like an old king led forth from his palace, When his people to battle are pouring...

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
It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon.

James Russell Lowell
There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.

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

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

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

James Russell Lowell
O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.

James Russell Lowell
Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.

James Russell Lowell
Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.

James Russell Lowell
And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.

James Russell Lowell
Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.

James Russell Lowell
Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is subjected to chemical tests.

James Russell Lowell
A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

James Russell Lowell
Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.

James Russell Lowell