Lyman Abbott Quotes

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

Patience is passion tamed.

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

The artist does not really create; he discovers.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

The ideal of character always runs beyond the attainment.

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

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

Service makes men competent.

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.

Courage is caution overcome.

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.

Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. It is simply a history of the process of life. With the secret cause of life evolution has nothing to do. A man, therefore, may be a materialistic evolutionist or a theistic evolutionist; that is, he may believe that the cause is some single unintelligent impersonal force, or he may believe that the cause is a wise and beneficent God.

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.

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

The highest qualities of character...must be earned.

Religion is not a conclusion of the reason.

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

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.