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There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.

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
Two
Genius
May
Second
Compel
Firsts
Told
Understands
First
Present
Wishes
Must
Age
Tells
Kind
Wish
Kinds
Understand
Eternal
Speak
Highest

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A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.
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Behind the dim unknown, Standeth God with the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
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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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A wise man travels to discover himself.
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It is good To lengthen to the last a sunny mood.
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Darkness is strong, and so is Sin, But surely God endures forever!
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No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
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What a man pays for bread and butter is worth its market value, and no more. What he pays for love's sake is gold indeed, which has a lure for angels' eyes, and rings well upon God's touchstone.
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A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
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Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.
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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.
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Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth I claim of thee the promise of thy youth.
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There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
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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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Suddenly all the sky is hid As with the shutting of a lid, One by one great drops are falling Doubtful and slow, Down the pane they are crookedly crawling, And the wind breathes low Slowly the circles widen on the river, Widen and mingle, one and all Here and there the slenderer flowers shiver, Struck by an icy rain-drop’s fall.
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Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.
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Light is the symbol of truth.
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One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
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There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
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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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