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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.
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
Good
Triumphantly
Always
Cabbage
Would
Abolish
Answered
Rose
Question
Common
Sense
More quotes by James Russell Lowell
Not as all other women are Is she that to my soul is dear Her glorious fancies come from far, Beneath the silver evening star, And yet her heart is ever near.
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Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.
James Russell Lowell
In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.
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In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
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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.
James Russell Lowell
Borrowed garments never keep one warm.
James Russell Lowell
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
Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.
James Russell Lowell
I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.
James Russell Lowell
The fireflies o'er the meadow In pulses come and go.
James Russell Lowell
Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.
James Russell Lowell
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
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All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.
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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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Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.
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Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.
James Russell Lowell
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
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
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.
James Russell Lowell
He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.
James Russell Lowell
