Lydia Maria Child: Doing

Lydia Maria Child was American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist. Explore interesting quotes on doing.
Lydia Maria Child: 68 quotes1 like

“That a majority of women do not wish for any important change in their social and civil condition, merely proves that they are the unreflecting slaves of custom.”

Lydia Maria Child

Letter to the Advocates of Woman’s Suffrage (1870).
1870s

“Misfortune is never mournful to the soul that accepts it; for such do always see that every cloud is an angel’s face. Every man deems that he has precisely the trials and temptations which are the hardest of all others for him to bear; but they are so, simply because they are the very ones he most needs.”

Lydia Maria Child

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) <br class="br">Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/64/12264.html, vol. 1, letter 39

“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 Maria Child

1860s <br class="br">Source: Letter to John Fraser http://www.bartleby.com/66/71/12271.html (1868)

“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. Everything seems to me to come from the Infinite, to be filled with the Infinite, to be tending toward the Infinite. Do I see crowds of men hastening to extinguish a fire? I see not merely uncouth garbs, and fantastic, flickering lights, of lurid hue, like a trampling troop of gnomes—but straightway my mind is filled with thoughts about mutual helpfulness, human sympathy, the common bond of brotherhood, and the mysteriously deep foundations on which society rests; or rather, on which it now reels and totters.”

Lydia Maria Child

1840s, Letters from New York (1843) <br class="br">Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/65/12265.html, vol. 1, letter 1

“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 Maria Child

Philothea http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/9982 (1836), p. 51 (in EPUB version) <br class="br">1830s