Explore Quotes by James Russell Lowell

Truth, after all, wears a different face to everybody, and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.

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

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.

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

Who's not sat tense before his own heart's curtain.

Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.

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

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

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.

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

To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.

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

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

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.

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.

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.