“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.”

— Lydia Maria Child

1860s
Source: Letter to Harriet Seward http://www.bartleby.com/66/72/12272.html (1869)

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Lydia Maria Child 34

American abolitionist, author and women's rights activist 1802–1880

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“So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth?”

Vincent Van Gogh book The Letters of Vincent van Gogh

1880s, 1880, Letter to Theo (Cuesmes, July 1880)
Source: The Letters of Vincent van Gogh
Context: So please don't think that I am renouncing anything, I am reasonably faithful in my unfaithfulness and though I have changed, I am the same, and what preys on my mind is simply this one question: what am I good for, could I not be of service or use in some way, how can I become more knowledgeable and study some subject or other in depth? That is what keeps preying on my mind, you see, and then one feels imprisoned by poverty, barred from taking part in this or that project and all sorts of necessities are out of one's reach. As a result one cannot rid oneself of melancholy, one feels emptiness where there might have been friendship and sublime and genuine affection, and one feels dreadful disappointment gnawing at one's spiritual energy, fate seems to stand in the way of affection or one feels a wave of disgust welling up inside. And then one says “How long, my God!”

“I so detached my heart from the world and cut short my hopes that for thirty years now I have performed each prayer as though it were my last and I were praying the prayer of farewell.”

Rabia Basri Muslim saint and Sufi mystic

as quoted in Early Islamic Mysticism (New York: Paulist Press: 1996), p. 165

“Be firm and do not fear war. For that peace which some are so urgently pressing upon us is not peace but war. And the war for which I am so insistent is peace, not war for I do not thirst for the blood of anyone, nor will I drink it even in case of tumult. This is the end I have in view - the enervation of the oligarchy. Unless this takes place neither the truth of the Gospel nor its ministers will be safe among us. I have in mind nothing cruel, but what I do is friendly and paternal. I desire to save some who are perishing through ignorance. I am laboring to preserve liberty. Fear nothing; for we shall so manage all things with the goodness and the alliance of God that you shall not be ashamed nor displeased because of us.”

Huldrych Zwingli (1484–1531) leader of the Protestant Reformation in Switzerland, and founder of the Swiss Reformed Churches

Letter, 1529, ibid, p.301

“Every faculty in one man is the measure by which he judges of the like faculty in another. I judge of your sight by my sight, of your ear by my ear, of your reason by my reason, of your resentment by my resentment, of your love by my love. I neither have, nor can have, any other way of judging about them.”

Adam Smith book The Theory of Moral Sentiments

Section I, Chap. III.
The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Part I

“seven wonders of the world
and I have to ask for an eighth
fill a bottle with some prayers
and spend them on hope
create an easy route
just so I can complicate
send my heart down that
slippery slope”

David Levithan The Realm of Possibility

Source: The Realm of Possibility

“This is the beatitude that the blessed might have, and yet they have it not, except in so far as they are dead to themselves and absorbed in God. They have it not in so far as they remain in themselves and can say: `I am blessed.”

Catherine of Genoa (1447–1510) Italian author and nurse

Words are wholly inadequate to express my meaning, and I reproach myself for using them. I would that every one could understand me, and I am sure that if I could breathe on creatures, the fire of love burning within me would inflame them all with divine desire. O thing most marvelous!
Source: Life and Doctrine, Ch.IX

“Your lordship, only worldly light in this age of ours, you can never be pleased with another man's work for there is no man who resembles you, nor one to equal you … It grieves me greatly that I cannot recapture my past, so as to longer be at your service. As it is, I can only offer you my future, which is short, for I am too old … That is all I have to say. Read my heart for "the quill cannot express good will."”

Michelangelo Buonarroti (1475–1564) Italian sculptor, painter, architect and poet

Letter to Tommaso dei Cavalieri (1 January 1533).

“My protagonists, male and female, are me. And so I must be able to recall exactly what it was like to be five years old, and twelve, and sixteen, and twenty-two, and.... For, after all, I am not an isolated fifty-seven years old; I am every other age I have been, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven... all the way up to and occasionally beyond my present chronology.”

Madeleine L'Engle (1918–2007) American writer

The Crosswicks Journal, The Irrational Season (1977)

“I have found in my experience in government that I could ignore neither the age-old nor the brand-new dimensions of world politics.”

Joseph Nye (1937) American political scientist

Source: Understanding International Conflicts: An Introduction to Theory and History (6th ed., 2006), Chapter 1, Is There an Enduring Logic of Conflict in World Politics?, p. 2.

“I shall doubtless outlive some troublesome desires; but I am in no hurry about that; nor, when the time comes, shall I plume myself on the immunity just in the same way, I do not greatly pride myself on having outlived my belief in the fairy tales of Socialism. Old people have faults of their own; they tend to become cowardly, niggardly, and suspicious. Whether from the growth of experience or the decline of animal heat, I see that age leads to these and certain other faults; and it follows, of course, that while in one sense I hope I am journeying towards the truth, in another I am indubitably posting towards these forms and sources of error.”

Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894) Scottish novelist, poet, essayist, and travel writer

Crabbed Age and Youth.
Virginibus Puerisque and Other Papers (1881)

“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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Lydia Maria Child 34

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