James Russell Lowell

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

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Good luck is the willing handmaid of upright, energetic character, and conscientious observance of duty.

Puritanism, believing itself quick with the seed of religious liberty, laid, without knowing it, the egg of democracy.

Books are the bees which carry the quickening pollen from one to another mind.

Old events have modern meanings; only that survives of past history which finds kindred in all hearts and lives.

True freedom is to share All the chains our brothers wear, And, with heart and hand, to be Earnest to make others free!

Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

No man is born into the world whose work is not born with him. There is always work, and tools to work with, for those who will, and blessed are the horny hands of toil. The busy world shoves angrily aside the man who stands with arms akimbo until occasion tells him what to do; and he who waits to have his task marked out shall die and leave his errand unfulfilled.

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

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what are called the Rights of Man become turbulent and dangerous.

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.

Not what we give, but what we share, for the gift without the giver is bare.