James Russell Lowell: He gives only the worthless gold who gives from...

It is beginning to be doubtful whether Parliament and Congress sit in Westminster and Washington, or in the editorial rooms of the leading journals,--so thoroughly is everything debated before the authorized and responsible debaters get on their legs.

James Russell Lowell

printing legs rooms

But civlyzation doos git forrid

James Russell Lowell

carts powder sometimes

We cannot but think there is something like a fallacy in Mr. Buckle's theory that the advance of mankind is necessarily in the direction of science, and not in that of morals.

James Russell Lowell

moral science thinking

No man can produce great things who is not thoroughly sincere in dealing with himself, who would not exchange the finest show for the poorest reality, who does not so love his work that he is not only glad to give himself for it, but finds rather a gain than a sacrifice in the surrender.

James Russell Lowell

sacrifice men reality

Scepticism commonly takes up the room left by defect of imagination, and is the very quality of mind most likely to seek for sensual proof of supersensual things. If one came from the dead it could not believe; and yet it longs for such a witness, and will put up with a very dubious one.

James Russell Lowell

sensual imagination believe

Making one object, in outward or inward nature, more holy to a single heart is reward enough for a life; for the more sympathies we gain or awaken for what is beautiful, by so much deeper will be our sympathy for that which is most beautiful,--the human soul!

James Russell Lowell

soul heart beautiful

Practical application is the only mordant which will set things in the memory. Study without it is gymnastics, and not work, which alone will get intellectual bread.

James Russell Lowell

gymnastics intellectual memories

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.

James Russell Lowell

style literature mind

The secret of force in writing lies not so much in the pedigree of nouns and adjectives and verbs, as in having something that you believe in to say, and making the parts of speech vividly conscious of it.

James Russell Lowell

writing believe lying

Truth always has a bewitching savor of newness in it, and novelty at the first taste recalls that original sweetness to the tongue; but alas for him who would make the one a substitute for the other.

James Russell Lowell

tongue taste truth

Truth only needs to be for once spoken out; and there's such music in her, such strange rhythm, as makes men's memories her joyous slaves.

James Russell Lowell

truth men memories

To make the common marvelous is the test of genius.

James Russell Lowell

tests genius common

Many make the household but only one the home.

James Russell Lowell

household home

If one waits for the right time to come before writing, the right time never comes.

James Russell Lowell

right-time waiting writing

Better one bite at forty, of truths bitter rind, than the hot wine that gushed from the vintage of twenty.

James Russell Lowell

vintage wine twenties

That pernicious sentiment, "Our country, right or wrong."

James Russell Lowell

pernicious sentiments country

If God made poets for anything, it was to keep alive the traditions of the pure, the holy, and the beautiful.

James Russell Lowell

tradition alive beautiful

No mud can soil us but the mud we throw.

James Russell Lowell

mud soil

Not a change for the better in our human housekeeping has ever taken place that wise and good men have not opposed it-have not prophesied that the world would wake up to find its throat cut in consequence.

James Russell Lowell

cutting taken wise

Whenever you have the kind of market that is taking shape now - a wildly volatile one with big pricing discrepancies - it plays right into the hands of managers who are very focused on research and stock picking.

James Russell Lowell

research play hands

He gives only the worthless gold who gives from a sense of duty.