One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.
James Russell Lowell

Poetry is something to make us wiser and better, by continually revealing those types of beauty and truth, which God has set in all men's souls.
James Russell Lowell

Reputation is only a candle, of wavering and uncertain flame, and easily blown out, but it is the light by which the world looks for and finds merit.
James Russell Lowell

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

Solitude is as needful to the imagination as society is wholesome for the character.
James Russell Lowell

Thank God every morning when you get up that you have something to do that day, which must be done, whether you like it or not.
James Russell Lowell

The eye is the notebook of the poet.
James Russell Lowell

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.
James Russell Lowell

The greatest homage we can pay to truth, is to use it.
James Russell Lowell

The heart forgets its sorrow and ache.
James Russell Lowell

The mind can weave itself warmly in the cocoon of its own thoughts, and dwell a hermit anywhere.
James Russell Lowell

The only faith that wears well and holds its color in all weathers is that which is woven of conviction and set with the sharp mordant of experience.
James Russell Lowell

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

There are two kinds of weakness, that which breaks and that which bends.
James Russell Lowell

There is no good in arguing with the inevitable. The only argument available with an east wind is to put on your overcoat.
James Russell Lowell

There is nothing so desperately monotonous as the sea, and I no longer wonder at the cruelty of pirates.
James Russell Lowell

To educate the intelligence is to expand the horizon of its wants and desires.
James Russell Lowell

Toward no crimes have men shown themselves so cold- bloodedly cruel as in punishing differences of belief.
James Russell Lowell

True scholarship consists in knowing not what things exist, but what they mean; it is not memory but judgment.
James Russell Lowell

Truth forever on the scaffold, wrong forever on the throne.
James Russell Lowell