Quotes from Lyman Abbott

Courage is caution overcome.

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

Every life is march from innocence, through temptation, to virtue or vice.

Time never works. It eats, and undermines, and rots, and rusts, and destroys. But it never works. It only gives us an opportunity to work.

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

If I could conceive it possible that this universe were governed by a wisdom no greater than I am able to comprehend, I should not be able to believe in a God of infinite wisdom; for finite wisdom cannot comprehend infinite wisdom.

At length the long-wished-for fall of 1856 arrived — long wished for because I could not be sure of an income adequate to support a wife until I was admitted to the bar, and I could not be admitted to the bar until I was twenty-one.

There is evil in excess; there is evil in scant measure.

A knowledge of human nature is the first condition of the successful conduct of life. Every business man, lawyer, doctor, statesman, needs it. If a man should attempt to farm without any knowledge of seeds and soils, or to mine without any knowledge of metals, he would be sure to fail; how can he succeed in dealing with men if he knows nothing about human nature.

It seemed to me much more than the mere question whether the negro should remain in slavery; that it really involved the question whether liberty should be strangled on the continent dedicated to liberty.

A miracle constantly repeated becomes a process of nature.

Every yielding to temptation is a hindrance, not a help, to moral development; but every temptation offers what, rightly employed, is an indispensable means of moral development. For all moral development is through temptation to virtue.

Christ ransoms, Christ feeds, but, grandest truth of all, Christ frees—frees us from the fetters we have welded on our own wrists.

The noblest names in history are those, the records of whose lives are written in their own blood. To suffer is grander than to do: this has passed into a proverb. For illustrious lives we ransack, not palaces, but prisons.

Every soul is a battlefield.

Stop a minute. I may as well say here that this book is written in confidence. It is personal. It deals with the interior history of a very respectable church and some most respectable families. It contains a great deal that is not proper to be communicated to the public. The reader will please bear this in mind. Whatever I say, particularly what I am going to say now, is confidential. Don't mention it.

There must be some honest lawyers at the New York bar, and some impartial judges on the New York bench, but I should not like to be set to find them.

The story of Sodom and Gomorrah epitomizes the Gospel. Every act in the great, the awful drama of life is here foreshadowed. The analogy is so perfect that we might almost be tempted to believe that this story is a prophetic allegory, did not nature itself witness its historic truthfulness.

Religion was not always a dread to me. For one of my great ambitions was to be a minister, and one of my favorite childish vocations was preaching. I see myself now, a pale-faced, anemic, slim chap of ten or eleven, with all the appearance but none of the habits of an ascetic, preaching to a congregation of empty chairs.

Vanity of vanities, all is vanity, saith the preacher. To which I add, especially husbands. No man is proof against the flatteries of love. At least I am not, and I am glad of it.

Christ's sympathies are broader and His love is larger than we think.... We hedge him round with our poor creeds, and shut Him up in our little churches, and think He works only in our appointed ways. He breaks over the barriers we put about him, and carries on His work of love in hearts that we think are beyond all reach of Him or us. We cannot tell our brother how to find the light. The light will find him.

Vengeance does not satisfy. It sometimes gluts, but it does not satisfy. The duelist, angered by insult or wrong, challenges his enemy to a duel, runs his sword through the body of his opponent, leaves the life-blood oozing out of his arteries, wipes his sword, and walks off in the brightness of the morning. Satisfied? Never! Nemesis follows him; the vision is ever before his eyes; he has taken his vengeance, and the vengeance itself nestles in his heart and breeds future penalty.

My faith in God rests on my faith in Christ as God manifest in the flesh -- not as God and man, but as God in man.

Life proceeds from life.