James Russell Lowell Quotes

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.

Darkness is strong, and so is Sin,
But only God endures forever!

of courage and security from every sod of it would have evaporated beyond recall. We should be irrevocably cut

Few people take the trouble of trying to find out what democracy really is. Yet this would be a great help, for it is our lawless and uncertain thoughts, it is the indefiniteness of our impressions, that fill darkness, whether mental or physical, with spectres and hobgoblins. Democracy is nothing more than an experiment in government, more likely to succeed in a new soil, but likely to be tried in all soils, which must stand or fall on its own merits as others have done before it. For there is no trick of perpetual motion in politics any more than in mechanics.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood, for the good or evil side;
Some great cause, some new decision, offering each bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever twixt that darkness and that light.

A wise skepticism is the first attribute of a good critic.

Our slender life runs rippling by, and glides
Into the silent hollow of the past;
What is there that abides
To make the next age better for the last?

All the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.

The question of common sense is always "What is it good for?"—a question which would abolish the rose and be answered triumphantly by the cabbage.

The framers of the American Constitution were far from wishing or intending to found a democracy in the strict sense of the word, though, as was inevitable, every expansion of the scheme of government they elaborated has been in a democratical direction. But this has been generally the slow result of growth, and not the sudden innovation of theory; in fact, they had a profound disbelief in theory, and knew better than to commit the folly of breaking with the past. They were not seduced by the French fallacy that a new system of government could be ordered like a new suit of clothes. They would as soon have thought of ordering a new suit of flesh and skin. It is only on the roaring loom of time that the stuff is woven for such a vesture of their thought and experience as they were meditating. They recognized fully the value of tradition and habit as the great allies of permanence and stability. They all had that distaste for innovation which belonged to their race, and many of them a distrust of human nature derived from their creed.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

He stood a spell on one foot fust
Then stood a spell on t' other,
An' on which one he felt the wust
He could n't ha' told ye nuther.

Truth forever on the scaffold. Wrong forever on the throne. Yet that scaffold sways the future. Behind the dim unknown stands God, Within the shadow keeping watch above his own.