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Quotes from A Fable for Critics — James Russell Lowell

1819–1891 United States

← All quotes by James Russell Lowell

13 quotes

Her new bark is worse than ten times her old bite.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

And folks are beginning to think it looks odd,
To choke a poor scamp for the glory of God.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

For there's nothing we read of in torture's inventions,
Like a well-meaning dunce, with the best of intentions.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

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

A Fable for Critics (1848)

There comes Poe, with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

Got the ill name of augurs, because they were bores.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

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

A Fable for Critics (1848)

For though he builds glorious temples, 'tis odd
He leaves never a doorway to get in a god.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

There comes Emerson first, whose rich words, every one,
Are like gold nails in temples to hang trophies on;
Whose prose is grand verse while his verse the Lord knows
Is some of it pr— No, 't is not even prose!

A Fable for Critics (1848)

In creating, the only hard thing's to begin;
A grass-blade's no easier to make than an oak,
If you've once found the way you've achieved the grand stroke.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

But he turned up his nose at their murmuring and shamming,
And cared (shall I say?) not a d—n for their damning;
So they first read him out of their church and next minute
Turned round and declared he had never been in it.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

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.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

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.

A Fable for Critics (1848)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: James Russell Lowell (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.