James Russell Lowell Literature Quotations

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

In the ocean of baseness, the deeper we get, the easier the sinking.

Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.

And what is so rare as a day in June? Then, if ever, come perfect days.

It is the privilege of genius that life never grows common place, as it does for the rest of us.

Sincerity is impossible, unless it pervade the whole being, and the pretence of it saps the very foundation of character.

Every person born into this world their work is born with them.

Where one person shapes their life by precept and example, there are a thousand who have shaped it by impulse and circumstances.

Fortune is the rod of the weak, and the staff of the brave.

Incredulity robs us of many pleasures, and gives us nothing in return.

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

It is curious for one who studies the action and reaction of national literature on each other, to see the humor of Swift and Sterne and Fielding, after filtering through Richter, reappear in Carlyle with a tinge of Germanism that makes it novel, alien, or even displeasing, as the case may be, to the English mind.

Literature, properly so called, draws its sap from the deep soil of human nature's common and everlasting sympathies, the gathered leaf-mound of countless generations, and not from any top dressing capriciously scattered over the surface.

The riches of scholarship, the benignities of literature, defy fortune and outlive calamity. They are beyond the reach of thief or moth or rust. As they cannot be inherited, so they cannot, be alienated.

[B]ut in literature, it should be remembered, a thing always becomes his at last who says it best, and thus makes it his own.

Light is the symbol of truth.