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And what they dare to dream of, date to do.

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
Daring
Date
Dare
Dream

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.
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Praise follows truth afar off, and only overtakes her at the grave plausibility clings to her skirts and holds her back till then
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If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
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Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
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Aspiration sees only one side of every question possession many.
James Russell Lowell
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Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
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The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.
James Russell Lowell
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It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.
James Russell Lowell
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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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I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
James Russell Lowell
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Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us.
James Russell Lowell
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Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
James Russell Lowell
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They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.
James Russell Lowell
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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