James Russell Lowell Quotes (165 Quotes)

The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.

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

This child is not mine as the first was I cannot sing it to rest I cannot lift it up fatherly, And bless it upon my breast. Yet it lies in my little one's cradle, And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she 's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.

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

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

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

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.

In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.

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

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

Solitude is as needed to the imagination as society is wholesome to the character.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.

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