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It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.
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
Many
Endeavor
Make
Rough
Vain
Broken
Purpose
Lives
History
Strewn
Left
Purposes
More quotes by James Russell Lowell
The very gnarliest and hardest of hearts has some musical strings in it but they are tuned differently in every one of us.
James Russell Lowell
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean it is not memory but judgment.
James Russell Lowell
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.
James Russell Lowell
They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
James Russell Lowell
Our seasons have no fixed returns, Without our will they come and go At noon our sudden summer burns, Ere sunset all is snow.
James Russell Lowell
A poet must need be before his own age, to be even with posterity
James Russell Lowell
There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
James Russell Lowell
To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.
James Russell Lowell
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race.
James Russell Lowell
We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.
James Russell Lowell
A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell
The one thing finished in this hasty world.
James Russell Lowell
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
All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
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
The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Lowell
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
Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?
James Russell Lowell
