James Russell Lowell

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

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

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

“Greatly begin. Though thou have time, but for a line, be that sublime. Not failure, but low aim is crime.”

“The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.”

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

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

“I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.”

“Joy comes, grief goes, we know not how.”

“The eye is the notebook of the poet.”

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

“Democracy is the form of government that gives every man the right to be his own oppressor.”

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

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

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

“Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.”

“True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.”

“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.”

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