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Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.

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
Truth
Watches
Watch
Sways
Behinds
Scaffold
Behind
Throne
Forever
Thrones
Within
Unknown
Wrong
Keeping
Future
Shadow

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Aspiration sees only one side of every question possession many.
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Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
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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?
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The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
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All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.
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Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.
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Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
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Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.
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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.
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No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the surrender.
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The pine is the mother of legends.
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Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.
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Earth's noblest thing,-a woman perfected.
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Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
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Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality.
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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.
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To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.
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A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity
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