"May is a pious fraud of the almanac A ghastly parody of real Spring Shaped out of snow and breathed with eastern wind."
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Quote collection
James Russell Lowell quotes (page 18 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"Some day the soft Ideal that we wooed confronts us fiercely, foe-beset, pursued, and cries reproachful: Was it then my praise, and not myself was loved? Prove now thy truth; I claim of thee the promise of thy youth."
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"'Tis sorrow builds the shining ladder up, Whose golden rounds are our calamities, Whereon our firm feet planting, nearer God The spirit climbs, and hath its eyes unsealed. True it is that Death's face seems stern and cold When he is sent to summon those we love; But all God's angels come to us disguised; Sorrow and sickness, poverty and death, One after another, lift their frowning masks, And we behold the Seraph's face beneath, All radiant with the Glory and the calm Of having looked upon the front of God."
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"Wealth may be an excellent thing, for it means power, and it means leisure, it means liberty."
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"I don't believe in princerple, But oh I du in interest."
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"The wisest man could ask no more of fate Than to be simple, modest, manly, true, Safe from the many, honored by the few; Nothing to court in Church, or World, or State, But inwardly in secret to be great."
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"To win the secret of a weed's plain heart."
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"His heart kep' goin' pity-pat, But hern went pity-Zekle."
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"To me it seems not unreasonable to find a re-enforcement of optimism, a renewal of courage and hope, in the modern theory that man has mounted to what he is from the lowest step of potentiality, through toilsome grades of ever-expanding existence, even thought it have been by a spiral stairway, mainly dark or dusty, with loop-holes at long intervals only, and these granting but a narrow and one-sided view."
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"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."
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"Ye come and go incessant; we remain Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past; Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot, Of faith so nobly realized as this."
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"The child is not mine as the first was, I cannot sing it to rest, I cannot lift it up fatherly And bliss it upon my breast; Yet it lies in my little one's cradle And sits in my little one's chair, And the light of the heaven she's gone to Transfigures its golden hair."
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"Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday."
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"A profound common sense is the best genius for statesmanship."
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"For Humanity sweeps onward: where today the martyr stands, On the morrow crouches Judas with the silver in his hands; Far in front the cross stands ready and the crackling fagots burn, While the hooting mob of yesterday in silent awe return To glean up the scattered ashes into History's golden urn."
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"Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave."
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"God does not weigh criminality in our scales. We have one absolute, with the seal of authority upon it; and with us an ounce is an ounce, and a pound a pound. God's measure is the heart of the offender,--a balance which varies with every one of us, a balance so delicate that a tear cast in the other side may make the weight of error kick the beam."
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"Moral supremacy is the only one that leaves monuments, and not ruins, behind it."
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"It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is..."
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"In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past."
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