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The discontent with the existing order of things pervaded the atmosphere, wherever the conditions were favorable, long before Columbus, seeking the back door of Asia, found himself knocking at the front door of America.

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
Things
Front
Knocking
Doors
Asia
Conditions
Existing
Found
Wherever
Order
Atmosphere
Pervaded
America
Seeking
Favorable
Back
Door
Columbus
Long
Fronts
Discontent

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Who is it needs such flawless shafts as fate? What archer of his arrows is so choice, or hits the white so surely?
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'T is heaven alone that is given away 'T is only God may be had for the asking.
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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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In the storm, like a prophet o'ermaddened, Thou singest and tossest thy branches Thy heart with the terror is gladdened, Thou forebodest the dread avalanches.... In the calm thou o'erstretchest the valleys With thine arms, as if blessings imploring, Like an old king led forth from his palace, When his people to battle are pouring.
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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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Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.
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To win the secret of a weed's plain heart.
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The snow had begun in the gloaming, and busily all the night had been heaping field and highway with a silence deep and white.
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Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty.
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And what they dare to dream of, date to do.
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For only by unlearning Wisdom comes.
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Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.
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To put more faith in lies and hate than truth and love, is the true atheism.
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They have rights who dare maintain them.
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It is quite too common a practice, both in readers and the more superficial class of critics, to judge a book by what it is not, a matter much easier to determine than what it is.
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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.
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Where Church and State are habitually associated, it is natural that minds, even of a high order, should unconsciously come to regard religion as only a subtler mode of police.
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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.
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Endurance is the crowning quality.
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