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Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.

Lydia M. Child

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Lydia M. Child
Age: 78 †
Born: 1802
Born: January 1
Died: 1880
Died: January 1
Activist
Geologist
Journalist
Novelist
Poet
Writer
Medford
Massachusetts
Lydia Maria Francis Child
Consists
Wanting
Happiness
Much

More quotes by Lydia M. Child

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The civilization of any country may always be measured by the degree of equality between men and women and society will never come truly into order until there is perfect equality and copartnership between them in every department of human life.
Lydia M. Child
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A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.
Lydia M. Child
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To everything there is a bright side and a dark side and I hold it to be unwise, unphilosophic, unkind to others, and unhealthy for one's own soul, to form the habit of looking on the dark side. Cheerfulness is to the spiritual atmosphere what sunshine is to the earthly landscape. I am resolved to cherish cheerfulness with might and main.
Lydia M. Child
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Birds and beasts have in fact our own nature, flattened a semi-tone.
Lydia M. Child
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So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!
Lydia M. Child
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Make people happy and there will not be half the quarreling, or a tenth part of the wickedness there now is.
Lydia M. Child
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Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it for such do always see that every cloud is an angel's face.
Lydia M. Child
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Even if nothing worse than wasted mental effort could be laid to the charge of theology, that alone ought to be sufficient to banish it from the earth, as one of the worst enemies of mankind.
Lydia M. Child
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It is right noble to fight with wickedness and wrong the mistake is in supposing that spiritual evil can be overcome by physical means.
Lydia M. Child
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[U]sefulness is happiness, and... all other things are but incidental.
Lydia M. Child
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It is my mission to help in the breaking down of classes, and to make all men feel as if they were brethren of the same family, sharing the same rights, the same capabilities, and the same responsibilities. While my hand can hold a pen, I will use it to this end and while my brain can earn a dollar, I will devote it to this end.
Lydia M. Child
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Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.
Lydia M. Child
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There was a time when all these things would have passed me by, like the flitting figures of a theatre, sufficient for the amusement of an hour. But now, I have lost the power of looking merely on the surface.
Lydia M. Child
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All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find their capacities for doing good very inadequate to their aspirations. They do so much less than they want to do, and so much less than they, at the outset, expected to do, that their lives, viewed retrospectively, inevitably look like failure.
Lydia M. Child
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a great mind can attend to little things, but a little mind cannot attend to great things.
Lydia M. Child
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An effort made for the happiness of others lifts above ourselves.
Lydia M. Child
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But men never violate the laws of God without suffering the consequences, sooner or later.
Lydia M. Child
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Nature made us individuals, as she did the flowers and the pebbles but we are afraid to be peculiar, and so our society resembles a bag of marbles, or a string of mold candles. Why should we all dress after the same fashion? The frost never paints my windows twice alike.
Lydia M. Child
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Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being.
Lydia M. Child
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The boughs of no two trees ever have the same arrangement. Nature always produces individuals She never produces classes.
Lydia M. Child