Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2026 Update)
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251. “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

252. “There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual.”

— James Russell Lowell

253. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

255. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

258. “Large charity doth never soil, but only whitens soft white hands.”

— James Russell Lowell

259. “God’ll send the bill to you.”

— James Russell Lowell

260. “There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.”

— James Russell Lowell

261. “He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.”

— James Russell Lowell

262. “I don’t believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest.”

— James Russell Lowell

263. “Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.”

— James Russell Lowell

264. “There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.”

— James Russell Lowell

265. “The rich man’s sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.”

— James Russell Lowell

266. “Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.”

— James Russell Lowell

267. “Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.”

— James Russell Lowell

268. “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

269. “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

270. “All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion ; and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.”

— James Russell Lowell

271. “It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils; in its retired some drops of childhood’s dew still linger, defying manhood’s fiery noon.”

— James Russell Lowell

272. “Tyranny is always weakness.”

— James Russell Lowell

273. “Silence is sorrow’s best food.”

— James Russell Lowell

274. “New conditions of life will stimulate thought and give new forms to its expression.”

— James Russell Lowell

275. “There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

277. “Many make the household but only one the home.”

— James Russell Lowell

278. “And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.”

— James Russell Lowell

279. “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

280. “Who’s not sat tense before his own heart’s curtain.”

— James Russell Lowell

281. “Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.”

— James Russell Lowell

282. “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

283. “One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.”

— James Russell Lowell

284. “A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?”

— James Russell Lowell

285. “Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it.”

— James Russell Lowell

286. “Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?”

— James Russell Lowell

287. “Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.”

— James Russell Lowell

288. “There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.”

— James Russell Lowell

289. “Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful, – the human soul!”

— James Russell Lowell

290. “O reputation! dearer far than life.”

— James Russell Lowell

291. “The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.”

— James Russell Lowell

292. “He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”

— James Russell Lowell

293. “Over all life broods Poesy, like the calm blue sky with its motherly, rebuking face. She is the great reformer, and where the love of her is strong and healthy, wickedness and wrong cannot long prevail.”

— James Russell Lowell

294. “In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.”

— James Russell Lowell

295. “Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.”

— James Russell Lowell

296. “Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.”

— James Russell Lowell

297. “Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many.”

— James Russell Lowell

298. “Let us be thankful that there is no court by which we can be excluded from our share in the inheritance of the great poets of all ages and countries, to which our simple humanity entitles us.”

— James Russell Lowell

299. “Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.”

— James Russell Lowell

300. “The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.”

— James Russell Lowell