Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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251. “Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

253. “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

254. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

256. “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

257. “God’ll send the bill to you.”

— James Russell Lowell

258. “Heaven is neither here nor there to me. Everywhere and nowhere. Just not in between, But I believe in Heaven.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

260. “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

261. “Tyranny is always weakness.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

263. “It seems to me that the bane of our country is a profession of faith either with no basis of real belief, or with no proper examination of the grounds on which the creed is supposed to rest.”

— James Russell Lowell

264. “Silence is sorrow’s best food.”

— James Russell Lowell

265. “Winds wanders, and dews drip earthward; Rains fall, suns rise and set; Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

268. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

271. “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

272. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

276. “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

277. “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

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

— 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. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

284. “How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.”

— James Russell Lowell

285. “It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— 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. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

291. “Taste is the next gift to genius.”

— James Russell Lowell

292. “Most religion-mongers have bated their paradises with a bit of toasted cheese. They have tempted the body with large promises of possessions in their transmortal El Dorado. Sancho Panza will not quit his chimney-corner, but under promise of imaginary islands to govern.”

— James Russell Lowell

293. “The eye is the notebook of the poet.”

— James Russell Lowell

294. “The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.”

— James Russell Lowell

295. “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

296. “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

297. “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

298. “Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.”

— James Russell Lowell

299. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell