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Whoever claims to understand another person completely, is either entirely ignorant of himself, or else has a nature so small that he can measure it easily, and supposes it to be the standard of every other nature.

Lucy Larcom

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Lucy Larcom
Age: 69 †
Born: 1824
Born: March 5
Died: 1893
Died: April 17
Poet
Teacher
Writer
Beverly
Massachusetts
Persons
Standards
Supposes
Person
Completely
Standard
Every
Either
Whoever
Small
Entirely
Understand
Ignorant
Else
Measure
Another
Claims
Nature
Easily

More quotes by Lucy Larcom

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Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood. We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.
Lucy Larcom
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Let us not depreciate Earth. There is no atom in it but is alive and astir in the all-penetrating splendor of God. From the infinitesimal to the infinite, everything is striving to express the thought of His Presence with which it overflows.
Lucy Larcom
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Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places. Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing.
Lucy Larcom
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A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature.
Lucy Larcom
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To different minds, poetry may present different phases. To me, the reverent faith of the people I lived among, and their faithful everyday living, was poetry blossoms and trees and blue shies were poetry. God himself was poetry.
Lucy Larcom
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Sometimes it seems to me that God 's way of dealing with me is not to let me see much of my friends, those who are most to me in the spiritual life, lest I should forget that the invisible bond is the only reality. That is the only way I can reconcile myself to the inevitable separations of life and death.
Lucy Larcom
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God be thanked for the thinkers of good and noble thoughts! It wakes up all the best in ourselves, to come into close contact with others greater and better in every way than we are.
Lucy Larcom
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A journal of the 'subjective' kind I have always thought foolish, as nurturing a morbid self -consciousness in the writer and yet, alone so much as I am, it is well to have some sort of a ventilator from the interior.
Lucy Larcom
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What is the meaning of 'gossip?' Doesn't it originate with sympathy, an interest in one's neighbor, degenerating into idle curiosity and love of tattling? Which is worse, this habit, or keeping one's self so absorbed intellectually as to forget the sufferings and cares of others, to lose sympathy through having too much to think about?
Lucy Larcom
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I am willing to make any part of my life public, if it will help others.
Lucy Larcom
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The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it — whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend.
Lucy Larcom
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These blossoms, gathered in familiar paths, With dear companions now passed out of sight, Shall not be laid upon their graves. They live, Since love is deathless. Pleasure now nor pride Is theirs in mortal wise, but hallowing thoughts Will meet the offering, of so little worth, Wanting the benison death has made divine.
Lucy Larcom
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Every true friend is a glimpse of God.
Lucy Larcom
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A friend is a beloved mystery dearest always because he is not ourself, and has something in him which it is impossible for us to fathom. If it were not so, friendship would lose its chief zest.
Lucy Larcom
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I defied the machinery to make me its slave. Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.
Lucy Larcom
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The whole world of thought lay unexplored before me, - a world of which I had already caught large and tempting glimpses.
Lucy Larcom
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If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.
Lucy Larcom
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The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud.
Lucy Larcom
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Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree, What the glory of thy boughs shall be?
Lucy Larcom
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Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise. It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it.
Lucy Larcom