Edwin A. Abbott Quotes

In One Dimensions, did not a moving Point produce a Line with two terminal points?In two Dimensions, did not a moving Line produce a Square wit four terminal points?In Three Dimensions, did not a movi...

There are not wanting, it is true, some promulgators of paradoxes who maintain that there is no necessary connection between geometrical and moral Irregularity.

Avoid exaggerations.

On the weak and aged, and especially on delicate Females, the force of attraction tells much more heavily than on the robust of the Male Sex, so that it is a point of breeding, if you meet a Lady on t...

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.

This omnividence, as you call it—it is not a common word in Spaceland—does it make you more just, more merciful, less selfish, more loving? Not in the least. Then how does it make you more divine?I. M...

Upward, not Northward

E traine questa lezione: che l'essere soddisfatti di sé significa essere vili e ignoranti, e che è sempre meglio aspirare a qualcosa che essere ciecamente, e impotentemente, felici

Behold yon miserable creature. That Point is a Being like ourselves, but confined to the non-dimensional Gulf. He is himself his own World, his own Universe; of any other than himself he can form no c...

The birth of children is too important a matter to have been allowed to depend upon such an accident as proximity.

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...

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.

Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their places, move freely about, on or in the surface,...

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 humiliatio...

To comport oneself with perfect propriety in Polygonal society, one ought to be a Polygon oneself.

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 Irr...

¡Oh ser ignorante y obstinado! Os creéis la perfección de la existencia y sois en realidad el más imperfecto y estúpido de todos los seres. ¡Os ufanáis de ver, cuando no podéis ver, más que un punto!...

لو كنت رجلاً منطقيا - مع أنني أرتاب بعض الشيء في كونكـ رجلا – لأنكـ تمتلكـ فيما يبدو صوتا واحدا، ولكن لو كانت لديكـ ذرة من المنطق، لاستمعت إلى صوت العقل، أنت تطلب مني أن أصدق أن هناكـ نوعا أخر من الحر...

My Lord, you own wisdom has taught me to aspire to One even more great, more beautiful, and more closely approximate to perfection than yourself. As you yourself, superior to all Flatland forms, combi...

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;