Top 40 Lyman Abbott Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Patience is passion tamed.”

— Lyman Abbott

2. “Do not teach your children never to be angry; teach them how to be angry.”

— Lyman Abbott

3. “Every soul is a battlefield.”

— Lyman Abbott

4. “Commerce is a form of warfare.”

— Lyman Abbott

5. “Do not think that you can fight corruption without while you let corruption fester within.”

— Lyman Abbott

6. “A miracle constantly repeated becomes a process of nature.”

— Lyman Abbott

7. “Every life is a march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.”

— Lyman Abbott

8. “It is only by human experiences that we can interpret the Divine.”

— Lyman Abbott

9. “He who says, “I know no fear,” is no hero. No man knows courage unless he does know fear, and has that in him which is superior to fear, and conquers it.”

— Lyman Abbott

10. “A child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal, with possibilities of virtue and vice – but as yet unstained.”

— Lyman Abbott

11. “No man can be patient who has not strong passions, for patience is passion tamed.”

— Lyman Abbott

12. “I abhor a hoe. I am fond of flowers but not of dirt, and had rather buy them than cultivate them.”

— Lyman Abbott

13. “God is in all nature; thank God for the scientists, for they are thinking the thoughts of God after him, whether they know it or not.”

— Lyman Abbott

14. “Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.”

— Lyman Abbott

15. “Behind all forms of beauty there is an infinite unity, and this unity, this intrinsic and eternal beauty, the artist is seeking to discern and to make others discern.”

— Lyman Abbott

16. “We often pray for purity, unselfishness, for the highest qualities of character, and forget that these things cannot be given, but must be earned.”

— Lyman Abbott

17. “I believe that God is the Great Companion, that we are not left orphans, that we may have comradeship with him.”

— Lyman Abbott

18. “The very essence of rationalism is that it assumes that the reason is the highest faculty in man and the lord of all the rest.”

— Lyman Abbott

19. “It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which competition can be put out of civilized life. Competition is the condition of life.”

— Lyman Abbott

20. “It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity.”

— Lyman Abbott

21. “Every great sin ought to rouse a great anger. Mob law is better than no law at all. A community which rises in its wrath to punish with misdirected anger a great wrong is in a healthier moral condition than a community which looks upon its perpetration with apathy and unconcern.”

— Lyman Abbott

22. “You, mother, are not responsible to set the whole world right; you are responsible only to make one pure, sacred, and divine household.”

— Lyman Abbott

23. “Every man’s life is, consciously or unconsciously, a quest for the infinite and the eternal reality.”

— Lyman Abbott

24. “All Christian worship is a witness of the resurrection of Him who liveth for ever and ever. Because He lives, “now abideth faith, hope, charity.””

— Lyman Abbott

25. “Man puts manacles on his fellow-man; God never.”

— Lyman Abbott

26. “The brotherhood of man is an integral part of Christianity no less than the Fatherhood of God; and to deny the one is no less infidel than to deny the other.”

— Lyman Abbott

27. “A graceful and blessed old age must have three elements in it: a happy retrospect, a peaceful present, and an inspiring future. And old age cannot have either one of these three if the youth has been wasted and manhood has been misspent.”

— Lyman Abbott

28. “I cannot harness a horse. I am afraid of a cow.”

— Lyman Abbott

29. “This is what evolution means – ordered progress; development from poorer to richer, from lower to higher, from less to greater – progress. In the material universe, progress to higher forms; in the moral universe, progress to higher life.”

— Lyman Abbott

30. “I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful though it may be, is still a land of captivity.”

— Lyman Abbott

31. “In New York – whose subway trains in particular have been “tattooed” with an energy to put our own rude practitioners to shame – not an inch of free space is spared except that of advertisements.”

— Lyman Abbott

32. “If there is to be no satisfaction in pleasure, none in wisdom, none in ambition, none in the golden mean, what then? Ah, where then? In duty. In doing right because it is right.”

— Lyman Abbott

33. “If I am to tell you how to grow old gracefully, I must tell you at the beginning of life; for no man can grow old gracefully unless he begins early.”

— Lyman Abbott

34. “Study how to do the most good and let the pay take care of itself.”

— Lyman Abbott

35. “If you and I have not seen God, we cannot bear witness to God.”

— Lyman Abbott

36. “A miracle no longer seems to me a manifestation of extraordinary power, but an extraordinary manifestation of ordinary power. God is always showing himself.”

— Lyman Abbott

37. “Whether we know it or not, we are all in a quest after the Great Companion. All study, all art, all music, all literature, all government, all industry are in essence a search after the Infinite.”

— Lyman Abbott

38. “It is a shame for a man to be a millionaire in possessions if he is not also a millionaire in beneficence.”

— Lyman Abbott

39. “Courage is caution overcome.”

— Lyman Abbott

40. “Service makes men competent.”

— Lyman Abbott

41. “Conscience is what? It is putting together a moral act and a moral ideal, and measuring the act by the ideal. It is putting this moral act which you do alongside the eternal laws of God, and seeing how it stands by those laws of God.”

— Lyman Abbott

42. “The artist does not really create; he discovers.”

— Lyman Abbott

43. “Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.”

— Lyman Abbott

44. “The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.”

— Lyman Abbott