Top 35 Edwin A. Abbott Quotes (2026 Update)

1. “Upward, not Northward.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

2. “In a word, to comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself. Such at least is the painful teaching of my experience.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

3. “I call our world Flatland, not because we call it so, but to make its nature clearer to you, my happy readers, who are privileged to live in Space.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

4. “Like all great art, it defies the tyrant Time.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

5. “Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon Regularity of conformation.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

6. “If a man with a triangular front and a polygonal back were allowed to exist and to propagate a still more Irregular posterity, what would become of the arts of life? Are the houses and doors and churches in Flatland to be altered in order to accommodate such monsters?”

— Edwin A. Abbott

7. “Moreover a blunt and stolid regard for literal truth indisposes them to make those lavish promises by which the more judicious Circle can in a moment pacify his consort. The result is massacre;.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

8. “For why should the thirst for knowledge be aroused, only to be disappointed and punished?”

— Edwin A. Abbott

9. “Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

10. “There are not wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

11. “Though we cannot SEE angles, we can INFER them, and this with great precision. Our sense of touch, stimulated by necessity, and developed by long training, enables us to distinguish angles far more accurately than your sense of sight, when unaided by a rule or measure of angles.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

12. “Doubtless, the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater Number require that it shall be hard.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

13. “I have actually known a case where a Woman has exterminated her whole household, and half an hour afterwards, when her rage was over and the fragments swept away, has asked what has become of her husband and her children.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

14. “Spaceland, whose appreciation has, with unexpected celerity, required a.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

15. “It fills all Space, and what It fills, It is. What It thinks, that It utters; and what It utters, that It hears; and It itself is Thinker, Utterer, Hearer, Thought, Word, Audition; it is the One, and yet the All in All. Ah, the happiness, ah, the happiness of Being!”

— Edwin A. Abbott

16. “I neglected my clients and my own business to give myself to the contemplation of the mysteries which I had once beheld, yet which I could impart to no one, and found daily more difficult to reproduce even before my own mental vision.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

17. “Yet mark his perfect self-contentment, and hence learn his lesson, that to be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, and that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impotently happy.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

18. “All this very plausible reasoning does not convince me, as it has not convinced the wisest of our Statesmen, that our ancestors erred in laying it down as an axiom of policy that the toleration of Irregularity is incompatible with the safety of the State.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

19. “True,” said the Sphere; “it appears to you a Plane, because you are not accustomed to light and shade and perspective; just as in Flatland a Hexagon would appear a Straight Line to one who has not the Art of Sight Recognition. But in reality it is a Solid, as you shall learn by the sense of Feeling.” He.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

20. “Only is often used ambiguously for alone. “The rest help me to revenge myself; you only advise me to wait.” This ought to mean, “you only advise, instead of helping;” but in similar sentences “you only” is often used for “you alone.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

21. “I looked, and, behold, a new world!”

— Edwin A. Abbott

22. “Avoid exaggerations.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

23. “With us, our Priests are Administrators of all Business, Art, and Science; Directors of Trade, Commerce, Generalship, Architecture, Engineering, Education, Statesmanship, Legislature, Morality, Theology; doing nothing themselves, they are the Causes of everything worth doing, that is done by others.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

24. “This can never be,” and on the other hand, “It must needs be precisely thus, and we know all about it.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

25. “If you would talk less nonsense, you would remember more sense.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

26. “You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually see an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a Circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions – how shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another’s configuration?”

— Edwin A. Abbott

27. “Thus ended my first attempt to convert a pupil to the Gospel of Three Dimensions.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

28. “They speak about ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human figure is really capable of choosing between them.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

29. “I am myself disposed to think that this is one of the many cases in which expense is the truest economy.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

30. “I pointed out that in some less civilized States no female is suffered to stand in any public place without swaying her back from right to left.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

31. “But he is not the Square he once was. Years of imprisonment, and the still heavier burden of general incredulity and mockery, have combined with the natural decay of old age to erase from his mind many of the thoughts and notions, and much also of the terminology, which he acquired during his short stay in Spaceland.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

32. “It is considered a disgrace to any State that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be, and is in every respectable female, a natural instinct.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

33. “How admirable is the Law of Compensation! And how perfect a proof of the natural fitness and, I may almost say, the divine origin of the aristocratic constitution of the States of Flatland! By a judicious use of this Law of Nature, the Polygons and Circles are almost always able to stifle sedition in its very cradle, taking advantage of the irrepressible and boundless hopefulness of the human mind.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

34. “Touched by my Wife’s distress, I would have sprung downward to reassure her, but I found myself incapable of motion. “Trouble not yourself about your Wife,” said my Guide: “she will not be long left in anxiety; meantime, let us take a survey of Flatland.”

— Edwin A. Abbott

35. “Hence, in every family of position and consideration, “back motion” is as prevalent as time itself;.”

— Edwin A. Abbott