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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
Purpose
Lives
History
Strewn
Left
Purposes
Many
Endeavor
Make
Rough
Vain
Broken
More quotes by James Russell Lowell
The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accursed Man is more than Constitutions better rot beneath the sod, Than be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God.
James Russell Lowell
How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.
James Russell Lowell
Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the Faery Queen.
James Russell Lowell
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
James Russell Lowell
The rich man's sons inherits cares The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.
James Russell Lowell
My gran'ther's rule was safer 'n 't is to crow: Don't never prophesy - onless ye know.
James Russell Lowell
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.
James Russell Lowell
Not but wut abstract war is horrid, I sign to thet with all my heart, But civilysation doos git forrid Sometimes, upon a powder-cart.
James Russell Lowell
The New World's sons from England's breast we drew Such milk as bids remember whence we came, Proud of her past wherefrom our future grew, This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame.
James Russell Lowell
How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.
James Russell Lowell
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.
James Russell Lowell
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.
James Russell Lowell
Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.
James Russell Lowell
Fashion being the art of those who must purchase notice at some cheaper rate than that of being beautiful, loves to do rash and extravagant things. She must be forever new, or she becomes insipid.
James Russell Lowell
There is surely room for yet another schoolmaster when a score of seers advertise themselves in Boston newspapers.
James Russell Lowell
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
Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.
James Russell Lowell
Ye come and go incessant we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this.
James Russell Lowell
If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
James Russell Lowell
Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
