Quotes By James Russell Lowell

Usually when people are sad, they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry, they bring about a change.

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

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

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

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

The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.

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.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

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

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

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

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

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

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

An appeal to the reason of the people has never been known to fail in the long run.

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.

Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.