James Russell Lowell Life Quotations

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?

There is no self-delusion more fatal than that which makes the conscience dreamy with the anodyne of lofty sentiments, while the life is groveling and sensual

Life seems a jest of Fate's contriving.

Not as all other women are Is she that to my soul is dear; Her glorious fancies come from far, Beneath the silver evening star, And yet her heart is ever near.

True love is but a humble, low born thing, And hath its food served up in earthenware; It is a thing to walk with, hand in hand, Through the every-dayness of this workday world.

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

Death is delightful. Death is dawn, The waking from a weary night Of fevers unto truth and light.

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

To be young is surely the best, if the most precarious, gift of life.

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.

There is only one thing better than tradition and that is the original and eternal life out of which all tradition takes its rise.

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.

Love lives on, and hath a power to bless when they who loved are hidden in the grave.

While tenderness of feeling and susceptibility to generous emotions are accidents of temperament, goodness is an achievement of the will and a quality of the life.

Let us be of good cheer, however, remembering that the misfortunes hardest to bear are those which never come.

Creativity is not the finding of a thing, but the making something out of it after it is found.

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.

Folks never understand the folks they hate.

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

As life runs on, the road grows strange with faces new -- and near the end. The milestones into headstones change, Neath every one a friend.