Quotes from James Russell Lowell

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.

Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

The rich man's sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

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.

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

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.

A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.

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.

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.

The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.

That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.

The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?

Did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive?

He's true to God who's true to man.