Famous James Russell Lowell Quotations

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"There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat."
by James Russell Lowell
"Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed."
by James Russell Lowell
"Light is the symbol of truth."
by James Russell Lowell
"It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence."
by James Russell Lowell
"Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it."
by James Russell Lowell
"A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity."
by James Russell Lowell
"All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action."
by James Russell Lowell
"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."
by James Russell Lowell
"But all God's angels come to us disguised..."
by James Russell Lowell
"Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor."
by James Russell Lowell
"Folks never understand the folks they hate."
by James Russell Lowell
"In creating, the only hard thing is to begin a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak."
by James Russell Lowell
"Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle."
by James Russell Lowell
"One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning."
by James Russell Lowell
"Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character."
by James Russell Lowell
"There is no good arguing with the inevitible. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat."
by James Russell Lowell
"They talk about their Pilgrim blood, Their birthright high and holy A mountain-stream that ends in mud Methinks is melancholy."
by James Russell Lowell
"They are slaves who fear to speak,
For the fallen and the weak."
by James Russell Lowell
"We live in oppressive times. We have, as a nation, become our own thought police but instead of calling the process by which we limit our expression of dissent and wonder 'censorship,' we call it 'concern for commercial viability.'"
by James Russell Lowell
"Wealth may be an ancient thing, for it means power, it means leisure, it means liberty."
by James Russell Lowell
"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."
by James Russell Lowell
"What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral."
by James Russell Lowell
"A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic."
by James Russell Lowell
"I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest."
by James Russell Lowell
"Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances."
by James Russell Lowell
"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."
by James Russell Lowell
"Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy."
by James Russell Lowell
"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."
by James Russell Lowell
"Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave."
by James Russell Lowell
"Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action."
by James Russell Lowell
"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."
by James Russell Lowell
"The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it."
by James Russell Lowell
"Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth."
by James Russell Lowell
"It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves."
by James Russell Lowell
"He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing."
by James Russell Lowell
"Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty."
by James Russell Lowell
"I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife."
by James Russell Lowell
"In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking."
by James Russell Lowell
"The foolish and the dead never change their opinions."
by James Russell Lowell
"He gives us the very quintessence of perception,"
by James Russell Lowell
"Endurance is the crowning quality..."
by James Russell Lowell
"Want gave tongue, and at her howl, Sin awakened with a growl."
by James Russell Lowell
"Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervades the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character."
by James Russell Lowell
"Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne."
by James Russell Lowell
"Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal."
by James Russell Lowell
"Let us be of good cheer, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never happen."
by James Russell Lowell
"It is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland."
by James Russell Lowell
"Every person born into this world their work is born with them."
by James Russell Lowell
"If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon."
by James Russell Lowell
"The misfortunes hardest to bear are these which never came."
by James Russell Lowell
"Freedom is the only law which genius knows."
by James Russell Lowell
"Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake,..."
by James Russell Lowell


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