Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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201. “Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.”

— James Russell Lowell

202. “Truth only needs to be for once spoken out; and there’s such music in her, such strange rhythm, as makes men’s memories her joyous slaves.”

— James Russell Lowell

203. “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

204. “Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.”

— James Russell Lowell

205. “A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.”

— James Russell Lowell

206. “Communism means barbarism.”

— James Russell Lowell

207. “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

208. “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

209. “In vain we call old notions fudge, And bend our conscience to our dealing; The Ten Commandments will not budge, And stealing will continue stealing.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

211. “The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.”

— James Russell Lowell

212. “Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch’s men talked with us face to face.”

— James Russell Lowell

213. “The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one. It has no conscience.”

— James Russell Lowell

214. “Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.”

— James Russell Lowell

215. “To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.”

— James Russell Lowell

216. “Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.”

— James Russell Lowell

217. “Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.”

— James Russell Lowell

218. “To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.”

— James Russell Lowell

219. “Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.”

— James Russell Lowell

220. “Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.”

— James Russell Lowell

221. “Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed, And feeds the green earth with its swift decay, Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.”

— James Russell Lowell

222. “They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.”

— James Russell Lowell

223. “Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.”

— James Russell Lowell

224. “Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.”

— James Russell Lowell

225. “The story of any one man’s real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.”

— James Russell Lowell

226. “Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.”

— James Russell Lowell

227. “Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.”

— James Russell Lowell

228. “Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving.”

— James Russell Lowell

229. “The victory’s in believing.”

— James Russell Lowell

230. “Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.”

— James Russell Lowell

231. “I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.”

— James Russell Lowell

232. “The nunneries of silent nooks, the murmured longing of the wood.”

— James Russell Lowell

233. “To have greatly dreamed precludes low ends.”

— James Russell Lowell

234. “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

235. “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

236. “The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.”

— James Russell Lowell

237. “This imputation of inconsistency is one to which every sound politician and every honest thinker must sooner or later subject himself. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinion.”

— James Russell Lowell

238. “That pernicious sentiment, “Our country, right or wrong.””

— James Russell Lowell

239. “The brain can be easy to buy, but the heart never comes to market.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

241. “It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.”

— James Russell Lowell

242. “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

243. “Tis as easy to be heroes as to sit the idle slaves.”

— James Russell Lowell

244. “Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.”

— James Russell Lowell

245. “It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.”

— James Russell Lowell

246. “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

247. “Beauty hath no true glass, except it be in the sweet privacy of loving eyes.”

— James Russell Lowell

248. “He who keeps his faith only, cannot be discrowned.”

— James Russell Lowell

249. “The discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.”

— James Russell Lowell

250. “That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.”

— James Russell Lowell