Quotes from James Russell Lowell

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.

Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

Sorrow is the great idealizer.

Good heavens, of what un costly material is our earthly happiness composed... if we only knew it. What incomes have we not had from a flower, and how unfailing are the dividends of the seasons.

Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it.

It is the vain endeavor to make ourselves what we are not that has strewn history with so many broken purposes and lives left in the rough.

Metaphor is no argument, though it be sometimes the gunpowder to drive one home, and imbed it in the memory.

Who speaks the truth stabs falsehood to the heart.

The traitor to Humanity is the traitor most accurst.

If we see light at the end of the tunnel, it's the light of the oncoming train.

In creating, the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.

Fanaticism, or, to call it by its milder name, enthusiasm, is only powerful and active so long as it is aggressive. Establish it firmly in power, and it becomes conservatism, whether it will or no.

I who still pray at morning and at eve Thrice in my life perhaps have truly prayed Thrice stirred below conscious self Have felt that perfect disenthrallment which is God.

It is not the insurrections of ignorance that are dangerous, but the revolts of the intelligence.

Mishaps are like knives, that either serve us or cut us, as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.

God is not dumb, that he should speak no more; If thou hast wanderings in the wilderness And find'st not Sinai, 'tis thy soul is poor.

Whatever you may be sure of be sure of this - that you are dreadfully like other people.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the later poetry has become science.