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Taste is the next gift to genius.

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
Next
Gift
Taste
Genius

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, - they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.
James Russell Lowell
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Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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If the devil take a less hateful shape to us than to our fathers, he is as busy with us as with them.
James Russell Lowell
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It is only the intellect that can be thoroughly and hideously wicked. It can forget everything in the attainment of its ends. The heart recoils in its retired some drops of childhood's dew still linger, defying manhood's fiery noon.
James Russell Lowell
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All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
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.
James Russell Lowell
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No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.
James Russell Lowell
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While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.
James Russell Lowell
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It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.
James Russell Lowell
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The thing we long for, that we are For one transcendent moment.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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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.
James Russell Lowell
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Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.
James Russell Lowell
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Truth is quite beyond the reach of satire. There is so brave a simplicity in her that she can no more be made ridiculous than an oak or a pine.
James Russell Lowell
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O visionary world, condition strange, Where naught abiding is but only change.
James Russell Lowell
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Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.
James Russell Lowell
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The fireflies o'er the meadow In pulses come and go.
James Russell Lowell
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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