“In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.”
Pt. I - Emerson, st. 1
A Fable for Critics (1848)
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James Russell Lowell 175
American poet, critic, editor, and diplomat 1819–1891Related quotes

Johnny Got His Gun (1938)
Context: There's a game out there, and the stakes are high. And the guy who runs it figures the averages all day long and all night long. Once in a while he lets you steal a pot. But if you stay in the game long enough, you've got to lose. And once you've lost there's no way back, no way at all.
“The soft droppes of rain perce the hard marble; many strokes overthrow the tallest oaks.”
Source: Euphues (Arber [1580]), P. 81. Compare: "Water continually dropping will wear hard rocks hollow", Plutarch, Of the Training of Children; "Stillicidi casus lapidem cavat" (translation: "Continual dropping wears away a stone"), Lucretius, i. 314; "Many strokes, though with a little axe,/ Hew down and fell the hardest-timber'd oak", William Shakespeare, 3 Henry VI, act ii, sc. 1.
Source: Buddy Holly is Alive and Well on Ganymede (1991), p. 114

“The more you've found, the less you've been around.”
"The Bronze", The Split CD (1998)
Lyrics, Queens of the Stone Age

The Origin of Species: 150th Anniversary Edition (2009)

“Youth is not an age thing. It's a quality. Once you've had it, you never lose it.”

Talk to schoolchildren in Oyster Bay, Christmastime (1898) http://www.trsite.org/content/pages/speaking-loudly, as quoted in The Bully Pulpit : A Teddy Roosevelt Book of Quotations (2002) by H. Paul Jeffers, p. 22
1890s

Quoted at Juliette Binoche: The Art of Being http://juliettebinoche.net, her official website