James Russell Lowell

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.

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

The foolish and the dead alone never change their opinions.

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

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.

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

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

Freedom is the only law which genius knows.

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.

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

Mishaps are like knives that either serve us or cut us as we grasp them by the blade or the handle.

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

Truth forever on the scaffold wrong forever on the throne.

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

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

There are two kinds of weakness that which breaks and that which bends.

Joy comes grief goes we know not how.

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

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

What a sense of security in an old book which time has criticized for us.

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

Endurance is the crowning quality And patience all the passion of great hearts.

In creating the only hard thing is to begin: a grass blade's no easier to make than an oak.

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

Truth after all wears a different face to everybody and it would be too tedious to wait till all were agreed.

Fate loves the fearless.

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

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.

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

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

If youth be a defect it is one that we outgrow only too soon.

Usually when people are sad they don't do anything. They just cry over their condition. But when they get angry they bring about a change.

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

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

The eye is the notebook of the poet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of man is tested.

Every man feels instinctively that all the beautiful sentiments in the world weigh less than a single lovely action.

Good luck is the willing handmaid of a upright and energetic character and conscientious observance of duty.