"There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds."
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Quote collection
James Russell Lowell quotes (page 9 of 23)
453 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it."
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"It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind."
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"Here come the hum the golden bees Underneath full blossomed trees, At once with glowing fruit and flowers crowned."
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"Aspiration sees only one side of every question; possession many."
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"Taste is the next gift to genius."
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"Pride of origin, whether high or low, springs from the same principle in human nature; one is but the positive, the other the negative, pole of a single weakness."
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"Of my merit On that pint you yourself may jedge: All is, I never drink no sperit, Nor I haint never signed no pledge."
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"And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days."
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"The right of individual property is no doubt the very corner-stone of civilization, as hitherto understood; but I am a little impatient of being told that property is entitled to exceptional consideration because it bears all the burdens of the state. It bears those, indeed, which can be most easily borne, but poverty pays with its person the chief expenses of war, pestilence, and famine."
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"No price is set on the lavish summer; June may be had by the poorest comer."
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"Console yourself, dear man and brother; whatever you may be sure of, be sure at least of this, that you are dreadfully like other people. Human nature has a much greater genius for sameness than for originality."
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"Christ was the first true democrat that ever breathed, as the old dramatist Dekkar said he was the first true gentleman."
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"Sorrow is the great idealizer."
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"In the gain or loss of one race all the rest have equal claim."
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"Not as all other women are Is she that to my soul is dear; Her glorious fancies come from far, Beneath the silver evening star, And yet her heart is ever near."
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"What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings."
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"Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface."
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"There is something solid and doughty in the man that can rise from defeat, the stuff of which victories are made in due time, when we are able to choose our position better, and the sun is at our back."
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"There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual"
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