Quote

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

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
Word
Soul
Human
Responded
Humans
Sooner
Heart
Delight
Work
Later
Genius
Mankind

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

Image
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Lowell
Image
There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
James Russell Lowell
Image
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
Image
The green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.
James Russell Lowell
Image
It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils in its retired some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush The maple swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush.
James Russell Lowell
Image
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
Image
Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.
James Russell Lowell
Image
One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
James Russell Lowell
Image
They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
James Russell Lowell
Image
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Winds wanders, and dews drip earthward Rains fall, suns rise and set Earth whirls, and all but to prosper A poor little violet.
James Russell Lowell
Image
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean it is not memory but judgment.
James Russell Lowell
Image
How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.
James Russell Lowell
Image
A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.
James Russell Lowell
Image
The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.
James Russell Lowell
Image
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell