Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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151. “Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.”

— James Russell Lowell

152. “He’s true to God who’s true to man.”

— James Russell Lowell

153. “Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.”

— James Russell Lowell

154. “May is a pious fraud of the almanac.”

— James Russell Lowell

155. “Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.”

— James Russell Lowell

156. “The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.”

— James Russell Lowell

157. “The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.”

— James Russell Lowell

158. “You’ve gut to git up airly Ef you want to take in God.”

— James Russell Lowell

159. “It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.”

— James Russell Lowell

160. “A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil’s weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.”

— James Russell Lowell

161. “Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.”

— James Russell Lowell

162. “Time makes ancient good uncouth.”

— James Russell Lowell

163. “O chime of sweet Saint Charity, Peal soon that Easter morn When Christ for all shall risen be, And in all hearts new-born! That Pentecost when utterance clear To all men shall be given, When all shall say My Brother here, And hear My Son in heaven!”

— James Russell Lowell

164. “There is a law of neutralization of forces, which hinders bodies from sinking beyond a certain depth in the sea; but in the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.”

— James Russell Lowell

165. “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

166. “Freedom is the only law which genius knows.”

— James Russell Lowell

167. “They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.”

— James Russell Lowell

168. “Tiny Salmoneus of the air His mimic bolts the firefly threw.”

— James Russell Lowell

169. “The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.”

— James Russell Lowell

170. “No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.”

— James Russell Lowell

171. “A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.”

— James Russell Lowell

172. “A woman’s love Is mighty, but a mother’s heart is weak, And by its weakness overcomes.”

— James Russell Lowell

173. “Dear common flower, that grow’st beside the way, Fringing the dusty road with harmless gold, First pledge of blithesome May, Which children pluck, and, full of pride uphold.”

— James Russell Lowell

174. “The greater your real strength and power, the quieter it will be exercised.”

— James Russell Lowell

175. “Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still...”

— James Russell Lowell

176. “How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.”

— James Russell Lowell

177. “Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go; At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.”

— James Russell Lowell

178. “Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.”

— James Russell Lowell

179. “Children are God’s Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace.”

— James Russell Lowell

180. “Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us.”

— James Russell Lowell

181. “Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.”

— James Russell Lowell

182. “Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.”

— James Russell Lowell

183. “Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.”

— James Russell Lowell

184. “It is good To lengthen to the last a sunny mood.”

— James Russell Lowell

185. “There is something magnificent in having a country to love.”

— James Russell Lowell

186. “Every person born into this world their work is born with them.”

— James Russell Lowell

187. “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

188. “In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim.”

— James Russell Lowell

189. “A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.”

— James Russell Lowell

190. “Folks never understand the folks they hate.”

— James Russell Lowell

191. “This child is not mine as the first was; I cannot sing it to rest; I cannot lift it up fatherly, And bless it upon my breast. Yet it lies in my little one’s cradle, And sits in my little one’s chair, And the light of the heaven she ’s gone to Transfigures its golden hair.”

— James Russell Lowell

192. “Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it-have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.”

— James Russell Lowell

193. “What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.”

— James Russell Lowell

194. “The gift without the giver is rare.”

— James Russell Lowell

195. “That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.”

— James Russell Lowell

196. “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

197. “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

198. “Communism means barbarism.”

— James Russell Lowell

199. “No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.”

— James Russell Lowell

200. “He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.”

— James Russell Lowell