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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.

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
Always
Towers
Things
Longing
Seem
Past
Beckons
Seems
Leans
Back
Fairer
Look
Inaccessible
Looks
Tower

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They have rights who dare maintain them.
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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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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.
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And what they dare to dream of, date to do.
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The question of common sense is always: 'what is it good for?' - a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.
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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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The flowers or weeds that spring up tomorrow are in the seeds we sow today. The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
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A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.
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Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.
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He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
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Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
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Stern men with empires in their brains.
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The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.
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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.
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All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.
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One learns more metaphysics from a single temptation than from all the philosophers.
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Like streams that keep a summer mind Snow-hid in Jenooary.
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To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.
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And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
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It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
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