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

James Russell Lowell Quotes

Earth’s biggest country ‘s gut her soul, An’ risen up earth’s greatest nation.

— James Russell Lowell

The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great.

— James Russell Lowell

Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past.

— James Russell Lowell

Life seems a jest of Fate’s contriving.

— James Russell Lowell

I love her with a love as still As a broad river’s peaceful might, Which by high tower and lowly mill, Goes wandering at its own will, And yet does ever flow aright.

— James Russell Lowell

Whoever can endure unmixed delight, whoever can tolerate music and painting and poetry all in one, whoever wishes to be rid of thought and to let the busy anvils of the brain be silent for a time, let him read in the “Faery Queen.”

— James Russell Lowell

It may be glorious to write Thoughts that shall glad the two or three High souls, like those far stars that come in sight Once in a century.

— James Russell Lowell

Not only around our infancy Doth heaven with all its splendors lie; Daily, with souls that cringe and plot, We Sinais climb and know it not.

— James Russell Lowell

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

— James Russell Lowell

He gives us the very quintessence of perception,-the clearly crystalized precipitation of all that is most precious in the ferment of impression after the impertinent and obtrusive particulars have evaporated from the memory.

— James Russell Lowell

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.

— James Russell Lowell

Hush! Still as death, The tempest holds his breath As from a sudden will; The rain stops short, but from the eaves You see it drop, and hear it from the leaves, All is so bodingly still...

— James Russell Lowell

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

It is mediocrity which makes laws and sets mantraps and spring-guns in the realm of free song, saying thus far shalt thou go and no further.

— James Russell Lowell

Sentiment is intellectualized emotion; emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.

— James Russell Lowell

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

— James Russell Lowell

I tell ye wut, my judgment is you’re pooty sure to fail, Ez long ‘z the head keeps turnin’ back for counsel to the the tail.

— James Russell Lowell

How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.

— James Russell Lowell

My soul is not a palace of the past...

— James Russell Lowell

The victory’s in believing.

— James Russell Lowell
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