Quotes from Lyman Abbott

I cannot recall that even the supposedly awful temptations of a city life were temptations to us. Our companions were clean companions, our recreations were clean recreations, the plays we went to were clean plays.

How few of us appreciate the fact that a very great deal of physical suffering in after life comes from bad mental training in childhood! I do not mean suffering of an imaginary kind; I mean disease which may entirely ruin a life which might have been of use to the world, and which surely would have been happier but for the lost health. Many a chronic invalid might have preserved his health had he been taught to use his brain properly when a child.

It is not youth we want at Wheathedge, but spiritual life and earnestness. At least it is to be thought of. But as to salary-how we are to get a first class man at a third class salary puzzles me. I shall have to refer that to Mr. Wheaton. He is the financier of our church I believe.

Oh! fools and blind, not to know the Master whose servant nature is.

The experience of personal communication with God is as universal as the human race. Appreciation of the divine presence is more common than appreciation of art, music, or literature. Men and women who do not respond to music, see no beauty in pictures, never read, and could not understand literature if it were read to them, yet find comfort in sorrow, strength in temptation, courage in danger, and added joy in their enjoyments from the sense of a Father's presence.

There are modern writers on law that may be as valuable as Moses; there are poems of Browning and Tennyson and our own Whittier that are far more pervaded with the Christlike spirit than some on the Hebrew Psalmody. But there is no life like the life of Christ.

Carry your daily affairs to God. Ask his guidance in every emergency. Expect discoveries of his will. Let the promise of his help quicken all your faculties. Act for yourself energetically. Judge for yourself thoughtfully. Look unto God trustingly. Then will God both act and judge for you.

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.

My God is in the hearts of those that seek Him ... And in my heart I carry an assurance of His love that life cannot disturb. I know His love as the babe knows its mother's love, lying upon her breast. It knows her love though it neither understands her nature nor her ways.

Perhaps we expect time to work for us, when time is only given us that we may work.

When a man begins to justify the ways of God to man, he has entered on a very dangerous process.

This subordination of time and place to comfort and convenience is a part of her quite unconscious and therefore unformulated theory that life is the end and that all household arrangements are means to that end. She therefore believes that things are for folks, not folks for things, and always and instinctively acts on that belief.

We think if we can only take the temptation away from men, men will be virtuous. We are mistaken. Men are made virtuous by confronting temptation.

Christ is the manifestation of God, not of certain attributes of God or certain phases of his administration. There is no justice to be feared in God that was not manifested in Christ; there is no mercy to attract in Christ that is not eternally in God.

Never say you are too old. You do not say it now, perhaps; but by and by, when the hair grows gray and the eyes grow dim and the young despair comes to curse the old age, you will say, "It is too late for me." Never too late! Never too old! How old are you--thirty, fifty, eighty? What is that in immortality? We are but children.

For to laugh is as religious as to weep; and smiles may bring us into the companionship of the Father no less than tears.

For the man who does not want God of course will not find him; and the man who is busy searching for something else will not find God; and certainly the man who has coined the atrophy of faculty into a philosophy that the Eternal and the Invisible cannot be seen or known, cannot see or know.

We must look for God in Christ not only by reading about Christ, but by endeavoring to be like him. It is only by participation in his life that we can come to an acquaintance with him.

A wise, right, and true estimate of one's own powers is necessary to their highest and best use. The general who overestimates his forces leads them to defeat; he who underestimates them does not lead them at all.

Cleanliness is itself a virtue. Next to godliness? If she were quite frank with herself, she would probably change the order and say godliness is next to cleanliness. Certainly she would prefer as a visitor a clean sinner to a dirty saint.

Courage is the Christian's coronation. There is no crown without it.

Every man's life is, consciously or unconsciously, a quest for the infinite and the eternal reality.

It is in an especial degree the tendency of the present age to deal only with tangible truths. Reason is the highpriest of the Nineteenth Century. It knows only the phenomena which the senses report to it. Its philosophy scouts the aphorism of Pascal, " The heart has reasons of its own that the reason knows not of." It tries every teaching by scientific tests; weighs moral truths in the apothecary's scales; sends divine and unseen realities to the chemists to be analyzed and tested.

The child is a beam of sunlight from the Infinite and Eternal.