James Russell Lowell - Man Quotes

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Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

James Russell Lowell
A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.

James Russell Lowell
A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.

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
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
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
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
God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.

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
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
Laborin' man an' laborin' woman
Hev one glory an' one shame;
Ev'y thin' thet's done inhuman
Injers all on 'em the same.

James Russell Lowell
Great truths are portions of the soul of man;
Great souls are portions of eternity.

James Russell Lowell
Nature, they say, doth dote,
And cannot make a man
Save on some worn-out plan,
Repeating us by rote.

James Russell Lowell
Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

James Russell Lowell
No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors.

James Russell Lowell
The democratic theory is that those Constitutions are likely to prove steadiest which have the broadest base, that the right to vote makes a safety - valve of every voter, and that the best way of teaching a man how to vote is to give him the chance of practice. For the question is no longer the academic one, "Is it wise to give every man the ballot?" but rather the practical one, "Is it prudent to deprive whole classes of it any longer?" It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong in their heads.

James Russell Lowell
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of Truth with Falsehood, for the good or evil side.

James Russell Lowell
No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

James Russell Lowell
No man is born into the world whose work
Is not born with him. There is always work,
And tools to work withal, for those who will;
And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

James Russell Lowell
General C. is a dreffle smart man;
He's been on all sides that give places or pelf;
But consistency still was a part of his plan,—
He's been true to one party, an' that is himself.

James Russell Lowell
I do not believe in violent changes, nor do I expect them. Things in possession have a very firm grip. One of the strongest cements of society is the conviction of mankind that the state of things into which they are born is a part of the order of the universe, as natural, let us say, as that the sun should go round the earth. It is a conviction that they will not surrender except on compulsion, and a wise society should look to it that this compulsion be not put upon them. For the individual man there is no radical cure, outside of human nature itself, for the evils to which human nature is heir.

James Russell Lowell
That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.

James Russell Lowell
And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.

James Russell Lowell
It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.

James Russell Lowell
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise,
Which is seen through at once, if love give man eyes.

James Russell Lowell
The better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.

James Russell Lowell
A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

James Russell Lowell
The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.

James Russell Lowell
Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, — they were souls that stood alone,
While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone,
Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline
To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine,
By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

James Russell Lowell
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.

James Russell Lowell