James Russell Lowell: Trending quotes (page 9)

“We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”

“To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.”

“It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.”

“Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”

“From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the Evil in its nature.”

“If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by.”

“A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”

“Not failure, but low aim, is crime.”

“Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.”

“Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, —
One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.”

“The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.”

“Whatever be the effect of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for patriotism.”

“Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.”

“We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn this iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—
"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."”