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I would hardly change the sorrowful words of the poets for their glad ones. Tears dampen the strings of the lyre, but they grow the tensor for it, and ring even the clearer and more ravishingly.
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
Even
Glad
Lyre
Would
Tears
Sorrowful
Poet
Clearer
Ones
Ring
Grow
Strings
Grows
Poets
Words
Hardly
Change
Rings
Dampen
More quotes by James Russell Lowell
Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,--the human soul!
James Russell Lowell
Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned.
James Russell Lowell
Through aisles of long-drawn centuries my spirit walks in thought.
James Russell Lowell
Most men make the voyage of life as if they carried sealed orders which they were not to open till they were fairly in mid-ocean.
James Russell Lowell
There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.
James Russell Lowell
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
It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.
James Russell Lowell
A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.
James Russell Lowell
And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
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.
James Russell Lowell
Comparative criticism teaches us that moral and aesthetic defects are more nearly related than is commonly supposed.
James Russell Lowell
Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.
James Russell Lowell
The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.
James Russell Lowell
And what they dare to dream of, date to do.
James Russell Lowell
Life is a sheet of paper white / Whereon each one of us may write / His word or two, and then comes night.
James Russell Lowell
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
Reading Chaucer is like brushing through the dewy grass at sunrise.
James Russell Lowell
A stray hair, by its continued irritation, may give more annoyance than a smart blow.
James Russell Lowell
Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it.
James Russell Lowell