James Russell Lowell Quotes

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?

One of the most curious of these frenzies of exclusion was that against the emancipation of the Jews. All share in the government of the world was denied for centuries to perhaps the ablest, certainly the most tenacious, race that had ever lived in it - the race to whom we owed our religion and the purest spiritual stimulus and consolation to be found in all literature - a race in which ability seems as natural and hereditary as the curve of their noses, and whose blood, furtively mingling with the bluest bloods in Europe, has quickened them with its own indomitable impulsion.

The thing we long for, that we are
For one transcendent moment.

The traitor to humanity is the traitor most accursed;
Man is more than Constitutions; better rot beneath the sod,
Than to be true to Church and State while we are doubly false to God!

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!

Mr. Lincoln’s faith in God was qualified by a very well-founded distrust of the wisdom of man.

But John P.
Robinson, he
Sez they did n't know everythin' down in Judee.

under the influence of a political framework like our own.

By the light of burning martyrs, Christ, thy bleeding feet we track
Toiling up new Calv'ries ever with the cross that turns not back
New occasions teach new duties, time makes ancient good uncouth
We must upward still and onward, who would keep abreast of Truth

Though old the thought and oft exprest,
'Tis his at last who says it best.

Nature fits all her children with something to do, he who would write and can't write, can surely review.

Both of them mean that Labor has no rights which Capital is bound to respect,—that there is no higher law than human interest and cupidity.

Wut's words to them whose faith an' truth
On war's red techstone rang true metal;
Who ventered life an' love an' youth
For the gret prize o' death in battle?

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.