Lydia M. Child Quotes
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You find yourself refreshed in the presence of cheerful people. Why not make an honest effort to confer that pleasure on others? Half the battle is gained if you never allow yourself to say anything gloomy.
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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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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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But men never violate the laws of God without suffering the consequences, sooner or later.
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our republican ideas cannot be consistently carried out while women are excluded from any share in the government. ... Any class of human beings to whom a position of perpetual subordination is assigned, however much they may be petted and flattered, must inevitably be dwarfed, morally and intellectually.
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Birds and beasts have in fact our own nature, flattened a semi-tone.
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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.
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If we really believed that those who are gone from us were as truly alive as ourselves, we could not invest the subject with such awful depth of gloom as we do. If we could imbue our children with distinct faith in immortality, we should never speak of people as dead, but passed into another world. We should speak of the body as a cast-off garment, which the wearer had outgrown; consecrated indeed by the beloved being that used it for a season, but of no value within itself.
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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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The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and the crimes of humanity, all lie in the one word 'love'. It is the divine vitality that everywhere produces and restores life.
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a great mind can attend to little things, but a little mind cannot attend to great things.
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The United States is a warning rather than an example to the world.
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Flowers have spoken to me more than I can tell in written words. They are the hieroglyphics of angels, loved by all men for the beauty of their character, though few can decipher even fragments of their meaning.
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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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Law is not law, if it violates the principles of eternal justice.
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The great difficulty in education is that we give rules instead of inspiring sentiments. ... it is not possible to make rules enough to apply to all manner of cases; and if it were possible, a child would soon forget them. But if you inspire him with right feelings, they will govern his actions.
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Philosophy and the arts are but a manifestation of the intelligible ideas that move the public mind; and thus they become visible images of the nations whence they emanate.
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Ah, my friend, that is the only true church organization, when heads and hearts unite in working for the welfare of the human race!
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Childhood itself is scarcely more lovely than a cheerful, kindly, sunshiny old age.
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Work! work! that is my unfailing cure for all troubles.
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Neither lemonade nor anything else can prevent the inroads of old age. At present, I am stoical under its advances, and hope I shall remain so. I have but one prayer at heart; and that is, to have my faculties so far preserved that I can be useful, in some way or other, to the last.
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the excess of all good things is mischievous.
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There have always been a large class of thinkers who deny that the world makes any progress. They say we move in a circle; that evils are never conquered, but only change their forms.
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I keep working because I am quite sure that no particle of goodness or truth is ever really lost, however appearances may be to the contrary.
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They [slaves] have stabbed themselves for freedom-jumped into the waves for freedom-starved for freedom-fought like very tigers for freedom! But they have been hung, and burned, and shot-and their tyrants have been their historians!
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Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being.
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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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Happiness consists not in having much, but in wanting no more than you have.
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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.
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It is wonderful how shy even liberal ministers generally are about trusting people with the plain truth concerning their religion. They want to veil it in a supernatural haze. They are very reluctant to part with the old idea that God has given to Jews and Christians a peculiar monopoly of truth. It is a selfish view of God's government of the world, and it is time that we knew enough to outgrow it.
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