James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

James Russell Lowell
The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.

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
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