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

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It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
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Virtue treads paths that end not in the grave.
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For only by unlearning Wisdom comes.
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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.
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To fail at all is to fail utterly.
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My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 't is to crow: Don't never prophesy - onless ye know.
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The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.
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He who keeps his faith only, cannot be discrowned.
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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.
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The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.
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Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the Faery Queen.
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Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
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Aspiration sees only one side of every question possession many.
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Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
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The victory's in believing.
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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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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.
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He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.
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All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.
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