James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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

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

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

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

James Russell Lowell
All that hath been majestical
In life or death, since time began,
Is native in the simple heart of all,
The angel heat of man.

James Russell Lowell
In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science.

James Russell Lowell
Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality; it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.

James Russell Lowell
No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.

James Russell Lowell
There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.

James Russell Lowell
It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

James Russell Lowell
The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

James Russell Lowell
The realm of death seems an enemy's country to most men, on whose shores they are loathly driven by stress of weather; to the wise man it is the desired port where he moors his bark gladly, as in some quiet haven of the Fortunate Isles; it is the golden west into which his sun sinks, and, sinking, casts back a glory upon the leaden cloud-tack which had darkly besieged his day.

James Russell Lowell
Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.

James Russell Lowell
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

James Russell Lowell
While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.

James Russell Lowell
Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.

James Russell Lowell
The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.

James Russell Lowell
Let us be thankful that there is no court by which we can be excluded from our share in the inheritance of the great poets of all ages and countries, to which our simple humanity entitles us.

James Russell Lowell
The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.

James Russell Lowell
Long, sparkling aisles of steel-stemmed trees Bending to counterfeit a breeze...

James Russell Lowell
All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it

James Russell Lowell
The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine.

James Russell Lowell
Many-sidedness of culture makes our vision clearer and keener in particulars.

James Russell Lowell