Top 28 Edwin A. Abbott Quotes
#1. Yet at least we can admire the wise Prearrangement which has ordained that, as they have no hopes, so they shall have no memory to recall, and no forethought to anticipate, the miseries and humiliations which are at once a necessity of their existence and the basis of the constitution of Flatland.
Edwin A. Abbott
#2. 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
#3. 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
#4. 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
#5. 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
#6. Expediency therefore concurs with Nature in stamping the seal of its approval upon Regularity of conformation.
Edwin A. Abbott
#7. Doubtless, the life of an Irregular is hard; but the interests of the Greater Number require that it shall be hard.
Edwin A. Abbott
#8. It is a Law of Nature with us that a male child shall have one more side than his father, so that each generation shall rise (as a rule) one step in the scale of development and nobility. Thus the son of a Square is a Pentagon; the son of a Pentagon, a Hexagon; and so on.
Edwin A. Abbott
#9. Doubtless we cannot see that other higher Spaceland now, because we have no eye in our stomachs.
Edwin A. Abbott
#11. It is only now and then in some very remote and backward agricultural district that an antiquarian may still discover a square house.
Edwin A. Abbott
#12. The whole of the Targum deserves study as shewing how textual ambiguity or corruption may combine with doctrinal prepossession to modify tradition;
Chapter II, Section 2, Paragraph 1171
Edwin A. Abbott
#13. Either this is madness or it is Hell." "It is neither," calmly replied the voice of the Sphere, "it is Knowledge; it is Three Dimensions: open your eye once again and try to look steadily.
Edwin A. Abbott
#14. Spaceland, whose appreciation has, with unexpected celerity, required a
Edwin A. Abbott
#15. 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
#16. Few are the hearts whose happy lot it is at once to recognize in each other's voices the partner intended for them by Providence, and to fly into a reciprocal and perfectly harmonious embrace. With most of us the courtship is of long duration.
Edwin A. Abbott
#17. To be self-contented is to be vile and ignorant, ans that to aspire is better than to be blindly and impoitently happy.
Edwin A. Abbott
#18. Yet I exist in the hope that these memoirs ... may find their way to the minds of humanity in Some Dimension, and may stir up a race of rebels who shall refuse to be confined to limited Dimensionality.
Edwin A. Abbott
#19. 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
#20. 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
#21. 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
#22. Learn this 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
#23. You are not a man, but a feminine monstrosity with a bass voice!
Edwin A. Abbott
#25. Distress not yourself if you cannot at first understand the deeper mysteries of Spaceland. By degrees they will dawn upon you.
Edwin A. Abbott
#27. [W]alking sometimes in a perfectly desolate plain where there have been no houses nor trees to guide me, I have been occasionally compelled to remain stationary for hours together, waiting till the rain came before continuing my journey.
Edwin A. Abbott
#28. To comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself.
Edwin A. Abbott
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