James Russell Lowell Thinking Quotations

He who is firmly seated in authority soon learns to think security, and not progress, the highest lesson in statecraft.

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

Fate loves the fearless.

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.

The time is ripe, and rotten-ripe, for change; Then let it come: I have no dread of what Is called for by the instinct of mankind. Nor think I that God's world would fall apart Because we tear a parchment more or less. Truth is eternal, but her effluence, With endless change, is fitted to the hour; Her mirror is turned forward, to reflect The promise of the future, not the past. I do not fear to follow out the truth...

Fools, when their roof-tree falls, think it doomsday.

The first lesson of life is to burn our own smoke; that is, not to inflict on outsiders our personal sorrows and petty morbidness, not to keep thinking of ourselves as exceptional cases.

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

The true historical genius, to our thinking, is that which can see the nobler meaning of events that are near him, as the true poet is he who detects the divine in the casual; and we somewhat suspect the depth of his insight into the past who cannot recognize the godlike of to-day under that disguise in which it always visits us.

It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.

The sentimentalist does not think of what he does so much as of what the world will think of what he does.

They talk about their Pilgrim blood, their birthright high and holy! a mountain-stream that ends in mud thinks is melancholy.

So we're all right, an' I, for one, Don't think our cause'll lose in vally By rammin' Scriptur' in our gun, An' gittin' Natur' for an ally.

They are slaves who fear to speak For the fallen and the weak; They are slaves who will not choose Hatred, scoffing, and abuse, Rather than in silence shrink From the truth they needs must think; They are slaves who dare not be In the right with two or three.