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In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

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
Play
Blades
Hard
Grass
Thing
Plant
Make
Begin
Creativity
Creating
Easier
Oaks
Inspirational
Blade

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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The New World's sons from England's breast we drew Such milk as bids remember whence we came, Proud of her past wherefrom our future grew, This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame.
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Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
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And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
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Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.
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It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
James Russell Lowell
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Fate loves the fearless.
James Russell Lowell
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Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop’s fall.
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Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
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Who knows whither the clouds have fled? In the unscarred heaven they leave no wake And the eyes forget the tears they have shed, The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.
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The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools.
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Great truths are portions of the soul of man Great souls are portions of eternity.
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Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.
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Freedom needs all her poets it is they Who give her aspirations wings, And to the wiser law of music sway Her wild imaginings.
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The discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.
James Russell Lowell
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The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it but they are tuned differently in every one of us.
James Russell Lowell
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Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?
James Russell Lowell
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Once to every man and nation, comes the moment to decide, In the strife of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side Some great cause, some great decision, offering each the bloom or blight, And the choice goes by forever, ’twixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
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The pine is the mother of legends.
James Russell Lowell
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The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed Man is more than Constitutions better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.
James Russell Lowell
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It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
James Russell Lowell