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 (1802-1880) American abolitionist, activist, journalist, suffragist
Letter to John Fraser (1868)
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