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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?

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
Surely
Fate
Choice
Choices
Shafts
White
Archer
Needs
Flawless
Arrows
Hits

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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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.
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Each day the world is born anew for him who takes it rightly.
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But better far it is to speak One simple word, which now and then Shall waken their free nature in the weak And friendless sons of men.
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Take winter as you find him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly honest fellow with no nonsense in him, which is a great comfort in the long-run.
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To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
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There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
James Russell Lowell
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There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.
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Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.
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The dandelions and buttercups gild all the lawn: the drowsy bee stumbles among the clover tops, and summer sweetens all to me.
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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.
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
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Not as all other women are Is she that to my soul is dear Her glorious fancies come from far, Beneath the silver evening star, And yet her heart is ever near.
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In all literary history there is no such figure as Dante, no such homogeneousness of life and works, such loyalty to ideas, such sublime irrecognition of the unessential.
James Russell Lowell
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Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.
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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To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.
James Russell Lowell
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It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
James Russell Lowell
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Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell