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The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great.

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
Nothing
Safe
Manly
Many
Asks
Wisest
Great
Secret
Modesty
Men
State
Honored
World
Church
Modest
Simple
Simplicity
True
Court
States
Fate
Inwardly

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.
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We look at death through the cheap-glazed windows of the flesh, and believe him the monster which the flawed and cracked glass represents him.
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The quiet tenderness of Chaucer, where you almost seem to hear the hot tears falling, and the simple choking words sobbed out.
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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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A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity
James Russell Lowell
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There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.
James Russell Lowell
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Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.
James Russell Lowell
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Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
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There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
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It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.
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The green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.
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The future works out great men's destinies The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.
James Russell Lowell
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For only by unlearning Wisdom comes.
James Russell Lowell
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It was in making education not only common to all, but in some sense compulsory on all, that the destiny of the free republics of America was practically settled.
James Russell Lowell
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Taste is the next gift to genius.
James Russell Lowell
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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
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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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
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.
James Russell Lowell