546 Quotes by James Russell Lowell

Have you ever rightly considered what the mere ability to read means? That it is the key which admits us to the whole world of thought and fancy and imagination? to the company of saint and sage, of the wisest and the wittiest at their wisest and wittiest moment? That it enables us to see with the keenest eyes, hear with the finest ears, and listen to the sweetest voices of all time? More than that, it annihilates time and space for us.

In the earliest ages science was poetry, as in the latter poetry has become science.

Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it.

How I do love the earth. I feel it thrill under my feet. I feel somehow as if it were conscious of my love, as if something passed into my dancing blood from it.

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.

Life is constantly weighing us in very sensitive scales, and telling every one of us precisely what his real weight is to the last grain of dust.

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.

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.

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.