"A word once vulgarized can never be rehabilitated."
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Quote collection
James Russell Lowell quotes (page 15 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful."
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"And but two ways are offered to our will, Toil with rare triumph, ease with safe disgrace, The problem still for us and all of human race."
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"Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one."
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"They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three."
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"Earth gets its price for what Earth gives us; The beggar is taxed for a corner to die in, The priest hath his fee who comes and shrives us, We bargain for the graves we lie in; Each ounce of dross costs its ounce of gold... 'T is heaven alone that is given away, 'T is only God may be had for the asking; There is no price set on the lavish summer, And June may be had by the poorest comer."
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"They have rights who dare maintain them."
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"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."
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"Now the heart is so full that a drop overfills it; We are happy now because God wills it."
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"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."
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"My soul is not a palace of the past."
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"The ash her purple drops forgivingly And sadly, breaking not the general hush; The maple swamps glow like a sunset sea, Each leaf a ripple with its separate flush; All round the wood's edge creeps the skirting blaze, Ere the rain falls, the cautious farmer burns his brush."
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"Democracy is that form of society, no matter what its political classification, in which every man has a chance and knows that he has it."
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"A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache."
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"Stories now, to suit a public taste, must be half epigram, half pleasant vice."
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"Beauty hath no true glass, except it be in the sweet privacy of loving eyes."
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"Idleness induces caprice."
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"The ultimate result of protecting fools from their folly is to fill the planet full of fools."
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"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."
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