If the world seems cold to you, kindle fires to warm it.

The line urges an ethic of active, self-starting benevolence: when one experiences the world as emotionally “cold” (indifferent, harsh, or unwelcoming), the remedy is not withdrawal or complaint but the deliberate creation of warmth—through kindness, hospitality, community-building, or moral courage. The metaphor of “kindling fires” suggests small, practical acts that can spread, offering light and heat beyond the self. Attributed to Lucy Larcom, a poet associated with 19th‑century New England moral and devotional verse, the sentiment fits a tradition that treats character as something proved in action: one helps make the world one wishes to inhabit.