James Russell Lowell - Nature Quotes

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Pope had a sense of the neat rather than of the beautiful. His nature delighted more in detecting the blemish than in enjoying its charm.

James Russell Lowell
Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

James Russell Lowell
From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature's text;
And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the Evil in its nature.

James Russell Lowell
But life is sweet, though all that makes it sweet
Lessen like sound of friends' departing feet;
And Death is beautiful as feet of friend
Coming with welcome at our journey's end.
For me Fate gave, whate'er she else denied,
A nature sloping to the southern side;
I thank her for it, though when clouds arise
Such natures double-darken gloomy skies.

James Russell Lowell
Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.

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

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
Nature is always kind enough to give even her clouds a humorous lining.

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
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
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
Enthusiasm begets enthusiasm, eloquence produces conviction for the moment; but it is only by truth to Nature and the everlasting institutions of mankind that those abiding influences are won that enlarge from generation to generation.

James Russell Lowell
Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.

James Russell Lowell
Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness.

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