Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Faults
It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Mediocrity
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Literature, Reading, Books
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Genius
There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind; no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not, sooner or later, responded.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Genius
New occasions teach new duties.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Duty
Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Solitude, Imagination
When will poets learn that a grass-blade of their own raising is worth a barrow-load of flowers from their neighbor’s garden?
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Originality
Reputation is in itself only a farthing-candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Reputation, Self-Discovery
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Knowledge
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Intelligence, Intellectuals
He who ordained the Sabbath loves the poor.
—James Russell Lowell
A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Critics, Criticism
Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Belief
Such power there is in clear-eyed self-restraint.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Self-Control, Control
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Manners
Every person born into this world their work is born with them.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Work
The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Praise
In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Morality, Morals
Fashion must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Fashion
The intellect has only one failing, which, to be sure, is a very considerable one.—It has no conscience. Napoleon is the readiest instance of this. If his heart had borne any proportion to his brain, he had been one of the greatest men in all history.
—James Russell Lowell
It is marvellous in its mastery over that delightfully fortuitous inconsequence that is the adamantine logic of dreamland.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Words
The code of society is stronger with some persons than that of Sinai; and many a man who would not scruple to thrust his fingers in his neighbor’s pocket, would forego peas rather than use his knife as a shovel.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Society
The eye is the notebook of the poet.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Poetry
He gives us the very quintessence of perception.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Perception
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.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Truth
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Helping, Inaction, Getting Going, Goodness, Procrastination, Good Deeds, Deeds
All God’s angels come to us disguised.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Angels
Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
—James Russell Lowell
Topics: Dying, Death
As one lamp lights another, nor grows less,
So nobleness enkindleth nobleness.
—James Russell Lowell
Wondering Whom to Read Next?
- Thomas Bailey Aldrich American Writer
- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow American Poet
- Dorothy Parker American Humorist, Journalist
- Walt Whitman American Poet
- Nathaniel Parker Willis American Poet, Playwright
- John Jay Chapman American Writer
- Henry David Thoreau American Philosopher
- John Greenleaf Whittier American Poet, Abolitionist
- Robert Frost American Poet
- John Ciardi American Poet
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