Quote#Success & Failure
All who strive to live for something beyond mere selfish aims find…
Quote byLydia Maria Child · 1802–1880
Commonly attributed — not confirmed in an authoritative edition. Cited on Wikiquote to: 'Letter to John Fraser' (1868).
English (original)
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
More from Lydia Maria Child
I was gravely warned by some of my female acquaintances that no woman could expect to be regarded as a lady after she had written a book.
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.
Genius hath electric power Which earth can never tame, Bright suns may scorch and dark clouds lower, Its flash is still the same.
England may as well dam up the waters of the Nile with bulrushes as to fetter the step of Freedom, more proud and firm in this youthful land than where she treads the sequestered glens of Scotland, or couches herself among the magnificent …
Pillars are fallen at thy feet, Fanes quiver in the air, A prostrate city is thy seat, And thou alone art there.
what right we have to remove people from the places where they have been born and brought up, —where they have a home, which, however miserable, is still their home, —and where their relatives and acquaintances all reside. Africa is no …