Quote

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

James Russell Lowell

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

James Russell Lowell
Age: 72 †
Born: 1819
Born: February 22
Died: 1891
Died: August 12
Diplomat
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Poet
Writer
Cambridge
Massachusetts
Kind
Bends
Breaks
Kinds
Weakness
Destiny
Break
Two

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

Image
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.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman.
James Russell Lowell
Image
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.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.
James Russell Lowell
Image
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.
James Russell Lowell
Image
If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.
James Russell Lowell
Image
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Freedom needs all her poets it is they Who give her aspirations wings, And to the wiser law of music sway Her wild imaginings.
James Russell Lowell
Image
What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.
James Russell Lowell
Image
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
Image
The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Keats longed for fame, but longed above all to deserve it.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Certainly it is no shame to a man that he should be as nice about his country as his sweetheart, yet it would not be wise to hold everyone an enemy who could not see her with our own enchanted eyes.
James Russell Lowell
Image
It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Folks never understand the folks they hate.
James Russell Lowell
Image
They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.
James Russell Lowell