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There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

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
Conscience
Groveling
Makes
Dreamy
Self
Reverie
Life
Lofty
Fatal
Sensual
Sentiments
Delusion
Anodyne

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It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.
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Fate loves best such syllables as are sweet and sonorous on the tongue.
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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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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.
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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 green grass floweth like a stream Into the oceans's blue.
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Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice.
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Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.
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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.
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Borrowed garments never keep one warm.
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The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
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Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.
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Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,--the human soul!
James Russell Lowell
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The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.
James Russell Lowell
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Old gold has a civilizing virtue which new gold must grow old to be capable of secreting.
James Russell Lowell
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In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.
James Russell Lowell
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All thoughts that mold the age begin deep down within the primitive soul.
James Russell Lowell
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Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof.
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Good heavens, of what un costly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.
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Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.
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