“One word
Frees us of all the weight and pain of life:
That word is love.”
Source: Oedipus at Colonus, Line 1616–18
“The more you are motivated by love, the more fearless and free your actions will be.”
This has been attributed to Mansfield on the internet, but no published source by her or any other author has been located.
Misattributed
“The most powerful weapon on earth is the human soul on fire.”
As quoted in The 32d Infantry Division in World War II (1956) by Harold Whittle Blakeley, p. 3
“If you find someone you love in your life, then hang on to that love.”
"Princess Diana: 10 most inspiring quotes from the 'people's princess'", Hello Magazine, Daily News (1 July 2015)
“A successful marriage requires falling in love many times, always with the same person.”
The Complete Neurotic's Notebook (1981), Marriage
“Because I loved myself, I was loved.”
Becoming Light: Poems New and Selected (1991)
“The inner reality of love can be recognized only by love.”
Love Alone Is Credible (1963)
First attributed to Lincoln in 2002, this seems a paraphrase of a statement in the Lyceum address of 1838, while incorporating language used by Thomas E. Dewey (c. 1944), who said "By the same token labor unions can never be destroyed from the outside. They can only fail if they fail to lend their united support to full production in a free society".
Misattributed
“To ease another's heartache is to forget one's own.”
Quoted in a Edith A. Sawyer (1899), Mary Cameron
Misattributed
1860s, Allow the humblest man an equal chance (1860)
Context: Slavery is wrong. If Slavery is right, all words, acts, laws, and Constitutions against it, are themselves wrong, and should be silenced, and swept away. If it is right, we cannot justly object to its nationality — its universality; if it is wrong they cannot justly insist upon its extension — its enlargement. All they ask, we could readily grant, if we thought Slavery right; all we ask, they could as readily grant, if they thought it wrong. Their thinking it right, and our thinking it wrong, is the precise fact upon which depends the whole controversy. Thinking it right as they do, they are not to blame for desiring its full recognition, as being right; but, thinking it wrong, as we do, can we yield to them? Can we cast our votes with their view, and against our own? In view of our moral, social, and political responsibilities, can we do this?
Wrong as we think Slavery is, we can yet afford to let it alone where it is, because that much is due to the necessity arising from its actual presence in the nation; but can we, while our votes will prevent it, allow it to spread into the National Territories, and to overrun us here in these Free States?
If our sense of duty forbids this, then let us stand by our duty, fearlessly and effectively. Let us be diverted by none of those sophistical contrivances wherewith we are so industriously plied and belabored — contrivances such as groping for middle ground between the right and the wrong, vain as the search for a man who should be neither a living man nor a dead man — such as a policy of "don't care" on a question about which all true men do care — such as Union appeals beseeching true Union men to yield to Disunionists, reversing the divine rule, and calling, not the sinners, but the righteous to repentance — such as invocations of Washington, imploring men to unsay what Washington did.
“Life is hard but so very beautiful”
Source: Speech at a Republican Banquet, Chicago, Illinois, December 10, 1856 http://quod.lib.umich.edu/l/lincoln/lincoln2/1:413?rgn=div1;view=fulltext; see Roy P. Basler, ed., The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln, vol. 2 (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1953), p. 532
The Lord of Misrule
The Lord of Misrule and Other Poems (1915)
Context: He died and He went down to hell!
You know not what you mean.
Our rafters were of green fir. Also our beds were green.
But out of the mouth of a fool, a fool, before the darkness fall,
We tell you He is risen again,
The Lord of Life is risen again,
The boughs put forth their tender buds, and
Love is Lord of all!
Source: 1860s, Second State of the Union address (1862)
Source: 1860s, Speech at Hartford (1860)
Context: So with John Brown and Harper's Ferry. They charge it upon the Republican party and ignominiously fail in all attempts to substantiate the charge. Yet they go on with their bushwhacking, the pack in full cry after John Brown.
Attributed to "an American President" in Ármin Vámbéry (1884), All the Year Round. It more likely originates in a spoof testimonial that Artemus Ward (Charles Farrar Browne) wrote in an advertisement in 1863:
Posthumous attributions
