James Russell Lowell Men Quotations

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself.

A great man is made up of qualities that meet or make great occasions.

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.

Democracy gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.

What men prize most is a privilege, even if it be that of chief mourner at a funeral.

The surest plan to make a man is, think him so.

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.

The only conclusive evidence of a man's sincerity is that he gives himself for a principle. Words, money, all things else, are comparatively easy to give away; but when a man makes a gift of his daily life and practice, it is plain that the truth, whatever it may be, has taken possession of him.

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.

I willingly confess to so great a partiality for trees as tempts me to respect a man in exact proportion to his respect for them.

The better part of every man's education is that which he gives himself.

Talent is that which is in a man's power; genius is that in whose power a man is.

And I honor the man who is willing to sink half his present repute for the freedom to think, and, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak, Will risk t' other half for the freedom to speak.

No man is born into the world whose work Is not born with him. There is always work, And tools to work withal, for those who will; And blessed are the horny hands of toil.

It is singular how impatient men are with overpraise of others, how patient of overpraise of themselves; and yet the one does them no injury, while the other may be their ruin.

Men have their intellectual ancestry, and the likeness of some one of them is forever unexpectedly flashing out in the features of a descendant, it may be after a gap of several centuries. In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

In the parliament of the present every man represents a constituency of the past.

Once to every man and nation comes the moment to decide.

The future works out great men's destinies; The present is enough for common souls, Who, never looking forward, are indeed Mere clay wherein the footprints of their age Are petrified forever.

Whom the heart of man shuts out, Sometimes the heart of God takes in, And fences them all round about With silence mid the worlds loud din.

Did man e'er live Saw priest or woman yet forgive?

Count me o'er earth's chosen heroes, - they were souls that stood alone, While the men they agonized for hurled the contumelious stone, Stood serene, and down the future saw the golden beam incline To the side of perfect justice, mastered by their faith divine, By one man's plain truth to manhood and to God's supreme design.

For men in earnest have no time to waste In patching fig-leaves for the naked truth.

It is not without reason that fame is awarded only after death. The cloud-dust of notoriety which follows and envelops the men who drive with the wind bewilders contemporary judgment.

What men call luck Is the prerogative of valiant souls, The fealty life pays its rightful kings.

How little inventiveness there is in man, Grave copier of copies.

Truth only needs to be for once spoken out; and there's such music in her, such strange rhythm, as makes men's memories her joyous slaves.

A great part of human suffering has its root in the nature of man, and not in that of his institutions.

God is the only being who has time enough; but a prudent man, who knows how to seize occasion, can commonly make a shift to find as much as he needs.

No man, I suspect, ever lived long in the country without being bitten by these meteorological ambitions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to have been more deeply snowed up, to have more trees and larger blown down than his neighbors.

Our American republic will endure only as long as the ideas of the men who founded it continue dominant.

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.

The rich man's sons inherits cares; The bank may break, the factory burn, A breath may burst his bubble shares, And soft, white hands could hardly earn A living that would serve his turn.

Fastidiousness is only another word for egotism; and all men who know not where to look for truth save in the narrow well of self will find their own image at the bottom, and mistake it for what they are seeking.

Faith in God, faith in man, faith in work: this is the short formula in which we may sum up the teachings of the founders of New England,--a creed ample enough for this life and the next.

A father of the church said that property was theft, many centuries before Proudhon was born. Bourdaloue reaffirmed it. Montesquieu was the inventor of national workshops and of the theory that the state owed every man a living. Nay, was not the church herself the first organized democracy?

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.

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.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan Repeating us by rote: For him her Old World moulds aside she threw And, choosing sweet clay from the breast Of the unexhausted West, With stuff untainted shaped a hero new.

Never did Poesy appear So full of heaven to me, as when I saw how it would pierce through pride and fear To the lives of coarsest men.

The course of a great statesman resembles that of navigable rivers, avoiding immovable obstacles with noble bends of concession, seeking the broad levels of opinion on which men soonest settle and longest dwell, following and marking the almost imperceptible slopes of national tendency, yet always aiming at direct advances, always recruited from sources nearer heaven, and sometimes bursting open paths of progress and fruitful human commerce through what seem the eternal barriers of both.

Among the lessons taught by the French revolution, there is none sadder or more striking than this--that you may make everything else out of the passions of men except a political system that will work, and that there is nothing so pitilessly and unconsciously cruel as sincerity formulated into dogma.

Stern men with empires in their brains.

It may be conjectured that it is cheaper in the long run to lift men up than to hold them down, and that the ballot in their hands is less dangerous to society than a sense of wrong is in their heads.

A man is old when he can pass an apple orchard and not remember the stomachache.

It is the rooted instinct in men to admire what is better and more beautiful than themselves.

All thoughtful men are solitary and original in themselves.

Great truths are portions of the soul of man; Great souls are portions of eternity.

Those who know the truth are not equal to those who love it Confucius All truth is safe and nothing else is safe, but he who keeps back truth, or withholds it from men, from motives of expediency, is either a coward or a criminal.

Be NOBLE! and the nobleness that liesIn other men, sleeping, but never dead,Will rise in majesty to meet thine own.

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.

Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust, Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just; Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside, Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified.

The story of any one man's real experience finds its startling parallel in that of every one of us.

Truly there is a tide in the affairs of men; but there is no gulf-stream setting forever in one direction.

That cause is strong which has, not a multitude, but one strong man behind it.

Nature, they say, doth dote, And cannot make a man Save on some worn-out plan, Repeating us by rote.

Here was a type of the true elder race, And one of Plutarch's men talked with us face to face.

Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.

The soil out of which such men as he are made is good to be born on, good to live on, good to die for and to be buried in.

Men! whose boast it is that ye Come of fathers brave and free, If there breathe on earth a slave, Are ye truly free and brave?

Ah, men do not know how much strength is in poise, That he goes the farthest who goes far enough.

It is only by instigation of the wrongs of men that what we call the rights of men become turbulent and dangerous.

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.

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

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

He's true to God who's true to man.

Men's thoughts and opinions are in a great degree vassals of him who invents a new phrase or re-applies an old epithet. The thought or feeling a thousand times repeated becomes his at last who utters it best.