Quotes by James Russell Lowell
Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
Once to every person and nation come the moment to decide. In the conflict of truth with falsehood, for the good or evil side.
True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.
The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.
To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.
Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.
A weed is no more than a flower in disguise, Which is seen through at once, if love give a man eyes.
Endurance is the crowning quality, And patience all the passion of great hearts.
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.
I don't believe in principle, but I do in interest.
Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.
Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.
The true ideal is not opposed to the real but lies in it; and blessed are the eyes that find it.
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.
The foolish and the dead never change their opinions.
Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.
Freedom is the only law which genius knows.
I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.
Every person born into this world their work is born with them.
Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
