James russell lowell quotes

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

The pressure of public opinion is like the pressure of the atmosphere; you can't see it - but all the same, it is sixteen pounds to the square inch.

Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer.

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated.

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

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!

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.

Whatever you may be sure of, be sure of this, that you are dreadfully like other people.

Fate loves the fearless.

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

A woman's love Is mighty, but a mother's heart is weak, And by its weakness overcomes.

Reading enables us to see with the keenest eyes, to hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time.

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.

Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But surely God endures forever!

For only by unlearning Wisdom comes.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

The devil loves nothing better than the intolerance of reformers.

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.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.

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.

The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

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.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

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

History is clarified experience.

Slow are the steps of freedom, but her feet turn never backward.

The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.

The greater your real strength and power, the quieter it will be exercised.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

There is something magnificent in having a country to love.

Children are God's Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace.

And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

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

Stern men with empires in their brains.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

Those who love are but one step from heaven.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

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.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

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.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side; Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new - and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.

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

All God's angels come to us disguised.

The flowers or weeds that spring up tomorrow are in the seeds we sow today. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

What means this glory round our feet, The Magi mused, "more bright than morn!" And voices chanted clear and sweet, "To-day the Prince of Peace is born.

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

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

Idleness induces caprice.

Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.

Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change... [Truth's] mirror is turned forward, to reflect The promise of the future, not the past.

One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.

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

Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.

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.

As one lamp lights another, nor grows less,So nobleness enkindleth nobleness.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.

Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.

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

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

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

And what they dare to dream of, date to do.

Tyrants are but the spawn of Ignorance, Begotten by the slaves they trample on.

Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake; And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

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

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.

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

The Holy Supper is kept, indeed, In whatso we share with anothers need; Not what we give, but what we share, For the gift without the giver is bare; Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, Himself, his hungering neighbor, and me.

That best academy, a mother's knee.

Imagination, where it is truly creative, is a faculty, and not a quality; it looks before and after, it gives the form that makes all the parts work together harmoniously toward a given end, its seat is in the higher reason, and it is efficient only as a servant of the will. Imagination, as it is too often misunderstood, is mere fantasy, the image-making power, common to all who have the gift of dreams.

Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof; it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.

One day with life and heart Is more than time enough to find a world.

Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.

Light is the symbol of truth.

The better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.

Tyranny is always weakness

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

New occasions teach new duties.

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

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin.

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

No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work with, for those who will, and blessed are the horny hands of toil. The busy world shoves angrily aside the man who stands with arms akimbo until occasion tells him what to do; and he who waits to have his task marked out shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.

The question of common sense is always: 'what is it good for?' - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

Endurance is the crowning quality.

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.

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.

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

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed. She is said to lie at the bottom of a well, for the very reason, perhaps, that whoever looks down in search of her sees his own image at the bottom, and is persuaded not only that he has seen the goddess, but that she is far better looking than he had imagined.

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

They have rights who dare maintain them.

The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.

A wise man travels to discover himself.

Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.

And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.

Violet! sweet violet! Thine eyes are full of tears; Are they wet Even yet With the thought of other years?

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.

That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.

All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

True love is but a humble, low born thing, And hath its food served up in earthenware; It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand, Through the every-dayness of this workday world.