Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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51. “The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.”

— James Russell Lowell

52. “Be He nowhere else, God is in all that liberates and lifts, in all that humbles, sweetens, and consoles.”

— James Russell Lowell

53. “Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.”

— James Russell Lowell

54. “In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade’s no easier to make than an oak.”

— James Russell Lowell

55. “Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.”

— James Russell Lowell

56. “Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.”

— James Russell Lowell

57. “Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.”

— James Russell Lowell

58. “He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.”

— James Russell Lowell

59. “Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.”

— James Russell Lowell

60. “My soul is not a palace of the past...”

— James Russell Lowell

61. “Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.”

— James Russell Lowell

62. “These pearls of thought in Persian gulfs were bred, Each softly lucent as a rounded moon; The diver Omar plucked them from their bed, Fitzgerald strung them on an English thread.”

— James Russell Lowell

63. “All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.”

— James Russell Lowell

64. “We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.”

— James Russell Lowell

65. “The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.”

— James Russell Lowell

66. “Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.”

— James Russell Lowell

67. “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

68. “Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.”

— James Russell Lowell

69. “A friendship counting nearly forty years is the finest kind of shade-tree I know.”

— James Russell Lowell

70. “Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it.”

— James Russell Lowell

71. “Those who love are but one step from heaven.”

— James Russell Lowell

72. “Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.”

— James Russell Lowell

73. “To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.”

— James Russell Lowell

74. “The fireflies o’er the meadow In pulses come and go.”

— James Russell Lowell

75. “The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.”

— James Russell Lowell

76. “Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.”

— James Russell Lowell

77. “In life’s small things be resolute and great To keep thy muscle trained; Know’st thou when Fate Thy measure takes, or when she’ll say to thee, “I find thee worthy; do this deed for me?””

— James Russell Lowell

78. “To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.”

— James Russell Lowell

79. “All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.”

— James Russell Lowell

80. “Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.”

— James Russell Lowell

81. “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

82. “A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.”

— James Russell Lowell

83. “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

84. “If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.”

— James Russell Lowell

85. “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

86. “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

87. “Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.”

— James Russell Lowell

88. “No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the surrender.”

— James Russell Lowell

89. “The stiff rails were softened to swan’s-down, and still fluttered down the snow.”

— James Russell Lowell

90. “Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.”

— James Russell Lowell

91. “Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.”

— James Russell Lowell

92. “Stern men with empires in their brains.”

— James Russell Lowell

93. “Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary.”

— James Russell Lowell

94. “The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.”

— James Russell Lowell

95. “Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?”

— James Russell Lowell

96. “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.”

— James Russell Lowell

97. “Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.”

— James Russell Lowell

98. “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

99. “True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.”

— James Russell Lowell

100. “Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.”

— James Russell Lowell