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A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.

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
Toward
Sure
Reformer
Cheerfully
Reformers
Sets
Reform
Forth
Defeat

More quotes by Lydia M. Child

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Love is the divine quality that everywhere produces and restores life. To each and every one of us, it gives the power of working miracles if we will.
Lydia M. Child
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We first crush people to the earth, and then claim the right of trampling on them forever, because they are prostrate.
Lydia M. Child
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The laws of our being are such that we must perform some degree of use in the world, whether we intend it, or not but we can deprive ourselves of its indwelling joy, by acting entirely from the love of self.
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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The eye of genius has always a plaintive expression, and its natural language is pathos.
Lydia M. Child
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Over the river and through the wood, To grandfather's house we go The horse knows the way To carry the sleigh, Through the white and drifted snow.
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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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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Home - that blessed word, which opens to the human heart the most perfect glimpse of Heaven, and helps to carry it thither, as on an angel's wings.
Lydia M. Child
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A human heart can never grow old if it takes a lively interest in the pairing of birds, the reproduction of flowers, and the changing tints of autumn leaves.
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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I think we have reason to thank God for Abraham Lincoln. With all his deficiencies, it must be admitted that he has grown continually.
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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Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.
Lydia M. Child
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Every human being has, like Socrates, an attendant spirit and wise are they who obey its signals. If it does not always tell us what to do, it always cautions us what not to do.
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 rarest attainment is to grow old happily and gracefully.
Lydia M. Child
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Blessed indeed is the man who hears many gentle voices call him father.
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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Not in vain is Ireland pouring itself all over the earth. The Irish, with their glowing hearts and reverent credulity, are needed in this cold age of intellect and skepticism.
Lydia M. Child