Top 350 James Russell Lowell Quotes (2024 Update)
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301. “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

302. “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

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

— James Russell Lowell

304. “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

305. “The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.”

— James Russell Lowell

306. “Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But surely God endures forever!”

— James Russell Lowell

307. “All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.”

— James Russell Lowell

308. “Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.”

— James Russell Lowell

309. “Whenever you have the kind of market that is taking shape now – a wildly volatile one with big pricing discrepancies – it plays right into the hands of managers who are very focused on research and stock picking.”

— James Russell Lowell

310. “The opening of the first grammar school was the opening of the first trench against monopoly in Church and State.”

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

312. “Did man e’er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive?”

— James Russell Lowell

313. “For there’s nothing we read of in torture’s inventions, Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.”

— James Russell Lowell

314. “Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faery Queen.””

— James Russell Lowell

315. “To fail at all is to fail utterly.”

— James Russell Lowell

316. “A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.”

— James Russell Lowell

317. “The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.”

— James Russell Lowell

318. “Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave; plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then.”

— James Russell Lowell

319. “An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.”

— James Russell Lowell

320. “Sorrow is the great idealizer.”

— James Russell Lowell

321. “It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reasoning is.”

— James Russell Lowell

322. “The future works out great men’s destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.”

— James Russell Lowell

323. “There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.”

— James Russell Lowell

324. “It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.”

— James Russell Lowell

325. “There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.”

— James Russell Lowell

326. “The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.”

— James Russell Lowell

327. “Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.”

— James Russell Lowell

328. “Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.”

— James Russell Lowell

329. “With every step of the recent traveler our inheritance of the wonderful is diminished. Those beautiful pictured notes of the possible are redeemed at a ruinous discount in the hard coin of the actual.”

— James Russell Lowell

330. “Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.”

— James Russell Lowell

331. “God’s livery is a very plain one; but its wearers have good reason to be content. If it have not so much gold-lace about it as Satan’s, it keeps out foul weather better, and is besides a great deal cheaper.”

— James Russell Lowell

332. “O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.”

— James Russell Lowell

333. “Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire’s cup to the brim!”

— James Russell Lowell

334. “Earth’s biggest country ‘s gut her soul, An’ risen up earth’s greatest nation.”

— James Russell Lowell

335. “It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.”

— James Russell Lowell

336. “To genius life never grows commonplace.”

— James Russell Lowell

337. “Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.”

— James Russell Lowell

338. “Time is, after all, the greatest of poets; and the sons of Memory stand a better chance of being the heirs of Fame.”

— James Russell Lowell

339. “Not suffering, but faint heart, is worst of woes.”

— James Russell Lowell

340. “The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.”

— James Russell Lowell

341. “If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.”

— James Russell Lowell

342. “In general those who nothing have to say Contrive to spend the longest time in doing it.”

— James Russell Lowell

343. “Life may be given in many ways, and loyalty to truth be sealed as bravely in the closet as the field.”

— James Russell Lowell

344. “There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back.”

— James Russell Lowell

345. “From lower to the higher next, Not to the top, is Nature’s text; And embryo Good, to reach full stature, Absorbs the Evil in its nature.”

— James Russell Lowell

346. “It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.”

— James Russell Lowell

347. “All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious race that had ever lived in it.”

— James Russell Lowell

348. “A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity.”

— James Russell Lowell

349. “I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.”

— James Russell Lowell

350. “I love her with a love as still As a broad river’s peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright.”

— James Russell Lowell