Best 396 quotes of James Russell Lowell on MyQuotes

To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.

To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even thought it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view.

To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.

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

To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.

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.

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

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.

Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.

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

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.

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.

Two meanings have our lightest fantasies,- One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.

Tyranny is always weakness

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

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

Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.

Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.

We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.

What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticized for us!

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

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.

What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.

What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!

When I was a beggarly boy, And lived in a cellar damp, I had not a friend nor a toy, But I had Aladdin's lamp.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

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.

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.

Who gives himself with his alms feeds three, himself, his hungering neighbor and me.

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

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.

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.

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

With every anguish of our earthly part The spirit's sight grows clearer.

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.

Worshippers of light ancestral make the present light a crime.

Wut 's words to them whose faith an' truth On war's red techstone rang true metal; Who ventered life an' love an' youth For the gret prize o' death in battle?

Year by year, more and more of the world gets disenchanted. Even the icy privacy of the arctic and antarctic circles is invaded. We have played Jack Horner with our earth, till there is never a plum left in it.

Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.

In creating the only hard thing's to begin

On Lincoln: "A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.

Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future. Behind the dim unknown stands God, Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.