Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
Page 6 of 8

251. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

253. “Silence is sorrow’s best food.”

— James Russell Lowell

254. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

256. “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

257. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

260. “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

261. “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

262. “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

263. “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

264. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

266. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

269. “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

270. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

273. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— 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. “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

280. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

283. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

285. “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

286. “Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.”

— James Russell Lowell

287. “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

288. “No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

294. “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

295. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

297. “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

298. “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

299. “The one thing finished in this hasty world.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell