James Russell Lowell Quotes

333 Sourced Quotes

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
Now on the hills I hear the thunder mutter... Nearer and nearer rolls the thunder-clap,— You can hear the quick heart of the tempest beat.... Look! look! that livid flash! And instantly follows the rattling thunder, As if some cloud-crag, split asunder, Fell, splintering with a ruinous crash, On the Earth, which crouches in silence under; And now a solid gray wall of rain Shuts off the landscape, mile by mile...

James Russell Lowell
In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.

James Russell Lowell
The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.

James Russell Lowell
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.

James Russell Lowell
Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

James Russell Lowell
The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.

James Russell Lowell
But better far it is to speak
One simple word, which now and then
Shall waken their free nature in the weak
And friendless sons of men.

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
The sea was meant to be looked at from shore, as mountains are from the plain.

James Russell Lowell
The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.

James Russell Lowell
The path of nature is, indeed, a narrow one, and it is only the immortals that seek it, and, when they find it, do not find themselves cramped therein.

James Russell Lowell
Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then

James Russell Lowell
Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low; Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all; Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop's fall.

James Russell Lowell
God is not dumb, that he should speak no more;
If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness
And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.

James Russell Lowell
Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on.

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
But civlyzation doos git forrid
Sometimes upon a powder-cart.

James Russell Lowell
The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

James Russell Lowell
The green grass floweth like a stream
Into the oceans's blue.

James Russell Lowell
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.

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