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Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

James Russell Lowell

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James Russell Lowell
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 22
Died: 1891
Died: August 12
Diplomat
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Fear
Inspirational
Aim
Educational
Lows
Ambition
Failure
Failing
Crime

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
James Russell Lowell
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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!
James Russell Lowell
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I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.
James Russell Lowell
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In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
James Russell Lowell
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Fate loves the fearless.
James Russell Lowell
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God is not dumb, that he should speak no more If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.
James Russell Lowell
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Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.
James Russell Lowell
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The rich man's sons inherits cares The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.
James Russell Lowell
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Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary.
James Russell Lowell
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The purely Great Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere, Thou nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.
James Russell Lowell
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Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
James Russell Lowell
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O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.
James Russell Lowell
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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
James Russell Lowell
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A nature wise With finding in itself the types of all, With watching from the dim verge of the time What things to be are visible in the gleams Thrown forward on them from the luminous past, Wise with the history of its own frail heart, With reverence and sorrow, and with love, Broad as the world, for freedom and for man.
James Russell Lowell
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The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss 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.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Silence is sorrow's best food.
James Russell Lowell
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I tell ye wut, my judgment is you're pooty sure to fail, Ez long 'z the head keeps turnin' back for counsel to the the tail.
James Russell Lowell
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Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.
James Russell Lowell
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Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.
James Russell Lowell