Quote

A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.

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
Weak
Ready
Cunningly
Hand
Sneer
Point
Weapon
Hands
Poison
Always
Handle
Like
Devil
Weapons

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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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The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
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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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What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
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A wise man travels to discover himself.
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What visionary tints the year puts on, When falling leaves falter through motionless air Or numbly cling and shiver to be gone! How shimmer the low flats and pastures bare, As with her nectar Hebe Autumn fills The bowl between me and those distant hills, And smiles and shakes abroad her misty, tremulous hair!
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Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
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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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The Don Quixote of one generation may live to hear himself called the savior of society by the next.
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Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But surely God endures forever!
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The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.
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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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Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?
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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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Attention is the stuff that memory is made of, and memory is accumulated genius.
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I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.
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His heart kep' goin' pity-pat, But hern went pity-Zekle.
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And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
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Analysis is carried into everything. Even Deity is subjected to chemical tests.
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There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one, Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on.
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