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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

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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
Differently
Hardest
Musical
Hearts
Heart
Every
Tuned
Strings

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Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.
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Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne,- Yet that scaffold sways the Future, and, behind the dim unknown, Standeth God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own.
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What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
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Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
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Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.
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Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.
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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.
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They are slaves who fear to speak, for the fallen and the weak.
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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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And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.
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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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O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.
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The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.
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Ah, in this world, where every guiding thread Ends suddenly in the one sure centre, death, The visionary hand of Might-have-been Alone can fill Desire's cup to the brim!
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A ginooine statesman should be on his guard, if he must hev beliefs, not to b'lieve 'em too hard.
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They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.
James Russell Lowell
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Communism means barbarism.
James Russell Lowell
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No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
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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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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