Lydia Maria Child: Humanity

“The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word LOVE. It is the divine vitality that produces and restores life.”

Lydia Maria Child

Letters from New York https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdid=book-dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdot=1 (1841-1843), p. 206, Letter XXVIII, 29 Sep 1842
1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Context: The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word LOVE. It is the divine vitality that produces and restores life. To each and every one of us it gives the power of working miracles, if we will.

Love , Life , Lie

“None speak of the bravery, the might, or the intellect of Jesus; but the devil is always imagined as a being of acute intellect, political cunning, and the fiercest courage. These universal and instinctive tendencies of the human mind reveal much.”

Lydia Maria Child

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/59/12260.html, vol. 1, letter 34

Imagination , Courage , Universe

“Yours for the unshackled exercise of every faculty by every human being.”

Lydia Maria Child

Message to woman suffrage supporters (c. 1875)
1870s

Exercises

“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 Maria Child

1840s, Letters from New York (1843)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/61/12261.html, vol. 1, letter 34

Angels , Home , Help , Heart

“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)
Source: Letters from New York http://www.bartleby.com/66/65/12265.html, vol. 1, letter 1

Men , Light , Time , Help

“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)
1830s

“The cure for all the ills and wrongs, the cares, the sorrows, and crimes of humanity, all lie in that one word LOVE. It is the divine vitality that produces and restores life. To each and every one of us it gives the power of working miracles, if we will.”

Lydia Maria Child

Letters from New York https://play.google.com/store/books/details?id=dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdid=book-dcYDAAAAQAAJ&rdot=1 (1841-1843), p. 206, Letter XXVIII, 29 Sep 1842
1840s, Letters from New York (1843)

Love , Life , Making love , Lie