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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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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
Power
Theatre
Things
Surface
Would
Hour
Time
Merely
Like
Figures
Flitting
Looking
Amusement
Hours
Passed
Lost
Sufficient

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Birds and beasts have in fact our own nature, flattened a semi-tone.
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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.
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[U]sefulness is happiness, and... all other things are but incidental.
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Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.
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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.
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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.
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Work! work! that is my unfailing cure for all troubles.
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Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.
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It is impossible to exaggerate the evil work theology has done in the world.
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Thy treasures of gold Are dim with the blood of the hearts thou hast sold Thy home may be lovely, but round it I hear The crack of the whip, and the footsteps of fear.
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I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.
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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.
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So easy it is to see the errors of past ages, so difficult to acknowledge our own!
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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.
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A reformer is one who sets forth cheerfully toward sure defeat.
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An effort made for the happiness of others lifts above ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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