Lucy Larcom Quotes

Whatever with the past has gone, The best is always yet to come.

The peach-bud glows, the wild bee hums, and wind-flowers wave in graceful gladness.

He who plants a tree, plants a hope.

Few parents are aware of the difficulties that beset the minds of the little philosophers and theologians who sit upon their knees or play at their feet; and many a parent could not comprehend the disturbance, if he were aware of it.

A drop of water, if it could write out its own history, would explain the universe to us.

When April steps aside for May, Like diamonds all the rain-drops glisten;

Fresh violets open every day: To some new bird each hour we listen.

Some of us must wait for the best human gifts until we come to heavenly places.

Our natural desire for musical utterance is perhaps a prophecy that in a perfect world we shall all know how to sing.

Like a plant that starts up in showers and sunshine and does not know which has best helped it to grow, it is difficult to say whether the hard things or the pleasant things did me the most good.

Thou hastenest down between the hills to meet me at the road, The secret scarcely lisping of thy beautiful abode Among the pines and mosses of yonder shadowy height, Where thou dost sparkle into song, and fill the woods with light.

The New Hampshire girls who came to Lowell were descendants of the sturdy backwoodsmen who settled that State scarcely a hundred years before.... They were earnest and capable; ready to undertake anything that was worth doing. My dreamy, indolent nature was shamed into activity among them. They gave me a larger, firmer ideal of womanhood.

Every true friend is a glimpse of God.

I defied the machinery to make me its slave.

Its incessant discords could not drown the music of my thoughts if I would let them fly high enough.

The curse of covetousness is that it destroys manhood by substituting money for character.

The children with the streamlets sing, When April stops at last her weeping;

And every happy growing thing Laughs like a babe just roused from sleeping.

To her bier Comes the year Not with weeping and distress, as mortals do, But, to guide her way to it, All the trees have torches lit; Blazing red the maples shine the woodlands through.

Tailor's work--the finishing of men's outside garments--was the "trade" learned most frequently by women in [the 1820s and 1830s],and one or more of my older sisters worked at it; I think it must have been at home, for I somehow or somewhere got the idea, while I was a small child, that the chief end of woman was to make clothing for mankind.

There is something in the place where we were born that holds us always by the heart-strings.

One mistake with beginners in writing is, that they think it important to spin out something long. It is a great deal better not to write more than a page or two, unless you have something to say, and can write it correctly.

O Mariner-soul, Thy quest is but begun, There are new worlds Forever to be won.

Life hangs as nothing in the scale against dear Liberty!

Many kinds of fruit grow upon the tree of life, but none so sweet as friendship;

as with the orange tree its blossoms and fruit appear at the same time, full of refreshment for sense and for soul.

June falls asleep upon her bier of flowers;

In vain are dewdrops sprinkled o'er her, In vain would fond winds fan her back to life, Her hours are numbered on the floral dial.

Labor, in itself, is neither elevating or otherwise.

It is the laborer's privilege to ennoble his work by the aim with which he undertakes it, and by the enthusiasm and faithfulness he puts into it.

We were not meant to mask ourselves before our fellow-beings, but to be, through our human forms, true and clear utterances of the spirit within. Since God gave us these bodies, they must have been given us as guides to Him and revealers of Him.

Because its myriad glimmering plumes Like a great army's stir and wave;

Because its golden billows blooms, The poor man's barren walks to lave: Because its sun-shaped blossoms show How souls receive the light of God, And unto earth give back that glow I thank him for the Goldenrod.

Whatever science and philosophy may do for mankind, the world can never outgrow its need of the simplicity that is in Christ.

If the world's a veil of tears, Smile till rainbows span it.

These blossoms, gathered in familiar paths, With dear companions now passed out of sight, Shall not be laid upon their graves. They live, Since love is deathless. Pleasure now nor pride Is theirs in mortal wise, but hallowing thoughts Will meet the offering, of so little worth, Wanting the benison death has made divine.

Those who plant trees plant hope.

My 'must-have' was poetry. From the first, life meant that to me. And, fortunately, poetry is not purchasable material, but an atmosphere in which every life may expand. I found it everywhere about me.

Our relatives form the natural setting of our childhood.

We understand ourselves best and are best understood by others through the persons who came nearest to us in our earliest years.

That larger vision is certain to make clear the value in our own lives of service to others.

I learned what education really is: the penetrating deeper and rising higher into life, as well as making continually wider explorations; the rounding of the whole human being out of its nebulous elements into form, as planets and suns are rounded, until they give out safe and steady light. This makes the process a infinite one, not possible to be completed at any school.

We might all place ourselves in one of two ranks the women who do something, and the women who do nothing; the first being of course the only creditable place to occupy.

It is one of the most beautiful facts in this human existence of ours, that we remember the earliest and freshest part of it most vividly. Doubtless it was meant that our childhood should live on in us forever.

Canst thou prophesy, thou little tree, What the glory of thy boughs shall be?

The first real unhappiness I remember to have felt was when some one told me, one day, that I did not love God. I insisted, almost tearfully, that I did; but I was told that if I did truly love Him I should always be good. I knew I was not that, and the feeling of sudden orphanage came over me like a bewildering cloud.

A man may make a misanthrope of himself, but he is never one by nature.

The soul, cramped among the petty vexations of Earth, needs to keep its windows constantly open to the invigorating air of large and free ideas: and what thought is so grand as that of an ever-present God, in whom all that is vital in humanity breathes and grows?

The land is dearer for the sea, The ocean for the shore.

Religion is life inspired by Heavenly Love; and life is something fresh and cheerful and vigorous.

I regard a love for poetry as one of the most needful and helpful elements in the life-outfit of a human being. It was the greatest of blessings to me, in the long days of toil to which I was shut in much earlier than most young girls are, that the poetry I held in my memory breathed its enchanted atmosphere through me and around me, and touched even dull drudgery with its sunshine.

Sometimes it seems to me that God 's way of dealing with me is not to let me see much of my friends, those who are most to me in the spiritual life, lest I should forget that the invisible bond is the only reality. That is the only way I can reconcile myself to the inevitable separations of life and death.

The religion of our fathers overhung us children like the shadow of a mighty tree against the trunk of which we rested, while we looked up in wonder through the great boughs that half hid and half revealed the sky. Some of the boughs were already decaying, so that perhaps we began to see a little more of the sky than our elders; but the tree was sound at its heart.

It is the greatest of all mistakes to begin life with the expectation that it is going to be easy, or with the wish to have it so.

The beauty of work depends upon the way we meet it — whether we arm ourselves each morning to attack it as an enemy that must be vanquished before night comes, or whether we open our eyes with the sunrise to welcome it as an approaching friend.

I don't own an inch of land, but all I see is mine.

I am willing to make any part of my life public, if it will help others.

I never thought that the possession of money would make me feel rich: it often does seem to have an opposite effect. But then, I have never had the opportunity of knowing, by experience, how it does make one feel. It is something to have been spared the responsibility of taking charge of the Lord's silver and gold.