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Large charity doth never soil, but only whitens soft white hands.

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
Doth
Soft
Soil
Charity
Large
White
Hands
Never

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Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
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God is not dumb, that he should speak no more If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.
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Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.
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It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.
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No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.
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The stiff rails were softened to swan's-down, and still fluttered down the snow.
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All free governments, whatever their name, are in reality governments by public opinion and it is on the quality of this public opinion that their prosperity depends. It is, therefore, their first duty to purify the element from which they draw the breath of life.
James Russell Lowell
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I don't believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest.
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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.
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If youth be a defect, it is one that we outgrow only too soon.
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Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.
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I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.
James Russell Lowell
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A sneer is the weapon of the weak.
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I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed, Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.
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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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The purely Great Whose soul no siren passion could unsphere, Thou nameless, now a power and mixed with fate.
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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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To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.
James Russell Lowell
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The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair.
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Stern men with empires in their brains.
James Russell Lowell