Lydia M. Child Quotes

Beauty and Genius must be kept afar if one would avoid becoming their slave.

Faith is the bird that sings while it is yet dark.

Always surround yourself with friends that have plenty of light in them. That way, you will always have candles around you when days are dark.

There are bad times just around the corner, There are dark clouds travelling through the sky, And it's no good whining, About a silver lining, For we know from experience they won't roll by...

However dark our lot may be, there is light enough on the other side of the cloud.

Genius is a bend in the creek where bright water has gathered, and which mirrors the trees, the sky and the banks. It just does that because it is there and the scenery is there. Talent is a fine mirror with a silver frame, with the name of the owner engraved on the back.

Talent is the capacity of doing anything that depends on application and industry and it is a voluntary power, while genius is involuntary.

Genius hath electric power which earth can never tame.

My genius is not so frail a thing that it cowers from the dirty fingers of newspapernen.

Sailors have an expression about the weather: they say the weather is a great bluffer. I guess the same is true of our human society — things can look dark, then a break shows in the clouds, and all is changed.

There are probably very few people who have not at some time of their lives had some quality of genius. If they have not had such, it is probable that they have also been without great sorrow or great pain. They would have needed only to live sufficiently intently for a time for some quality to reveal itself. The poems of first love are a case in point, and certainly such love is a sufficient stimulus.

Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free

You may chain my hands, you may shackle my feet; you may even throw me into a dark prison; but you shall not enslave my thinking, because it is free!

The sun is still there... even if clouds drift over it. Once you have experienced the reality of sunshine you may weep, but you will never feel ice about your heart again.

Since that day, when people have spoken to me of "genius", I have felt the inside pocket to make sure my wallet's still there.

It's not my fault so much as my genius.

Common sense is only a modification of talent. Genius is an exaltation of it. The difference is, therefore, in degree, not nature.

This is the nature of genius, to be able to grasp the knowable even when no one else recognizes that it is present.

See? There it is again. My flame in the dark.

Genius is supposed to be a power of producing excellences which are put of the reach of the rules of art: a power which no precepts can teach, and which no industry can acquire.

Should we continue to look upwards? Is the light we can see in the sky one of those which will presently be extinguished? The ideal is terrifying to behold... brilliant but threatened on all sides by the dark forces that surround it: nevertheless, no more in danger than a star in the jaws of the clouds.

A whole new kind of spiritual happiness dawns in us as we realize that dark clouds do not ruin sunny skies... they merely pass through them to help us remember our love of the light.

It will take a nation of millions to hold me back.

Harry looked at Bellman. He could not help but admire him. The way you admire a cockroach you flush down the toilet and it comes creeping back again and again and in the end it inherits the world.

I regret that I must so continually use the word genius, as if that should apply only to a caste as well defined from those below as income-tax payers are from the untaxed. The word genius was very probably invented by a man who had small claims on it himself; greater men would have understood better what to be a genius really was, and probably they would have come to see that the word could be applied to most people. Goethe said that perhaps only a genius is able to understand a genius.