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To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.

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
Precarious
Surely
Gift
Youth
Young
Best
Life

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

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In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.
James Russell Lowell
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The New World's sons from England's breast we drew Such milk as bids remember whence we came, Proud of her past wherefrom our future grew, This window we inscribe with Raleigh's fame.
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And the choice goes by forever 'twixt that darkness and that light.
James Russell Lowell
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That love for one, from which there doth not spring Wide love for all, is but a worthless thing.
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The future works out great men's destinies The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.
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Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.
James Russell Lowell
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Compromise makes a good umbrella, but a poor roof it is temporary expedient, often wise in party politics, almost sure to be unwise in statesmanship.
James Russell Lowell
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The one thing finished in this hasty world.
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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There are two kinds of genius. The first and highest may be said to speak out of the eternal to the present, and must compel its age to understand it the second understands its age, and tells it what it wishes to be told.
James Russell Lowell
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We kind o' thought Christ went agin war an' pillage.
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What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.
James Russell Lowell
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Truth forever on the scaffold, Wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell
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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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A sneer is the weapon of the weak. Like other devil's weapons, it is always cunningly ready to our hand, and there is more poison in the handle than in the point.
James Russell Lowell
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It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.
James Russell Lowell
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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
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The pale and quiet moon Makes her calm forehead bare, And the last fragments of the storm, Like shattered rigging from a fight at sea, Silent and few, are drifting over me.
James Russell Lowell
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Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.
James Russell Lowell
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A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.
James Russell Lowell