James Russell Lowell - Among My Books (1870)

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One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

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

James Russell Lowell
Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.

James Russell Lowell
There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.

James Russell Lowell
If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.

James Russell Lowell
Some kind of pace may be got out of the eeriest jade by the near prospect of oats; but the thoroughbred has the spur in his blood.

James Russell Lowell
Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.

James Russell Lowell
The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.

James Russell Lowell
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
There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

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

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
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the "Faery Queen."

James Russell Lowell
In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

James Russell Lowell
The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.

James Russell Lowell