Frasi di James Russell Lowell

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“Che sensazione di sicurezza dà un vecchio libro che il Tempo ha criticato per noi!”

“Non c'è niente di più disperatamente monotono del mare; non mi stupisco della ferocia dei pirati.”

“Non serve discutere con l'inevitabile. Il solo argomento contro il vento dell'est è infilarsi il cappotto.”

“Ogni uomo sente per istinto che tutti i bei sentimenti nel mondo pesano meno che una singola azione d'amore.”

“Un saggio scetticismo è il primo attributo di un buon critico.”

“No, no, questo genere di cose Leaves of Grass]… non vanno… la brava gente che segue (intendo i posteri) lo rifiuteranno.”

“Benedetti coloro che non hanno nulla da dire e che non si lasciano convincere a dirlo.”

“Ye come and go incessant; we remain
Safe in the hallowed quiets of the past;
Be reverent, ye who flit and are forgot,
Of faith so nobly realized as this.”

“Before Man made us citizens, great Nature made us men.”

“One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning.”

“And I honor the man who is willing to sink
Half his present repute for the freedom to think,
And, when he has thought, be his cause strong or weak,
Will risk t'other half for the freedom to speak,
Caring naught for what vengeance the mob has in store,
Let that mob be the upper ten thousand or lower.”

“Then to side with Truth is noble when we share her wretched crust,
Ere her cause bring fame and profit, and 't is prosperous to be just;
Then it is the brave man chooses, while the coward stands aside,
Doubting in his abject spirit, till his Lord is crucified,
And the multitude make virtue of the faith they had denied.”

“There is no work of genius which has not been the delight of mankind, no word of genius to which the human heart and soul have not sooner or later responded.”

“This goin' ware glory waits ye haint one agreeable feetur.”

“It may be glorious to write
Thoughts that shall glad the two or three
High souls, like those far stars that come in sight
Once in a century.”

“Sentiment is intellectualized emotion, — emotion precipitated, as it were, in pretty crystals by the fancy.”

“She thought no v'ice hed sech a swing
Ez hisn in the choir;
My! when he made Ole Hunderd ring
She knowed the Lord was nigher.”

“We are persuaded that the election of Mr. Lincoln will do more than anything else to appease the excitement of the country. He has proved both his ability and his integrity; he has had experience enough in public affairs to make him a statesman, and not enough to make him a politician.”

“To win the secret of a weed’s plain heart.”

“It is curious how tyrannical the habit of reading is, and what shifts we make to escape thinking. There is no bore we dread being left alone with so much as our own minds.”

“Things always seem fairer when we look back at them, and it is out of that inaccessible tower of the past that Longing leans and beckons.”

“From lower to the higher next,
Not to the top, is Nature’s text;
And embryo Good, to reach full stature,
Absorbs the Evil in its nature.”

“If I were asked what book is better than a cheap book, I should answer that there is one book better than a cheap book, — and that is a book honestly come by.”

“A reading-machine, always wound up and going,
He mastered whatever was not worth the knowing.”

“Not failure, but low aim, is crime.”

“Our Pilgrim stock wuz pithed with hardihood.”

“Two meanings have our lightest fantasies, —
One of the flesh, and of the spirit one.”

“The nurse of full-grown souls is solitude.”

“Whatever be the effect of slavery upon the States where it exists, there can be no doubt that its moral influence upon the North has been most disastrous. It has compelled our politicians into that first fatal compromise with their moral instincts and hereditary principles which makes all consequent ones easy; it has accustomed us to makeshifts instead of statesmanship, to subterfuge instead of policy, to party-platforms for opinions, and to a defiance of the public sentiment of the civilized world for patriotism.”

“Nature fits all her children with something to do,
He who would write and can't write, can surely review.”

“We see dimly in the Present what is small and what is great,
Slow of faith how weak an arm may turn this iron helm of fate,
But the soul is still oracular; amid the market's din,
List the ominous stern whisper from the Delphic cave within,—
"They enslave their children's children who make compromise with sin."”