Quotes by James Lowell

• Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
• 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.
• Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
• Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.
• 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.
• Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.
• Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.
• Fate loves the fearless.
• Every person born into this world their work is born with them.
• Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
• Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.
• Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
• Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
• Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
• Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.
• Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
• 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.
• Children are God's Apostles, sent forth, day by day, to preach of love, and hope, and peace.
• Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
• And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.
• An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.
• All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
• A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.
• A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
• Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
• It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.
• Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
• On one issue at least, men and women agree; they both distrust women.
• Not failure, but low aim, is crime.
• No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.
• Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.
• Light is the symbol of truth.
• Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
• It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
• One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
• Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
• In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
• In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
• If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
• I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
• He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
• Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
• Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
• Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.
• Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
• To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
• There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
• Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
• There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
• The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.
• 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.
• The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
• The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.
• The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.
• There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
• Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.
• Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.
• What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
• What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.
• Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.
• Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.
• The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
• The eye is the notebook of the poet.
• 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.
• True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.