Lyman Abbott Quotes

Habit converts luxurious enjoyments into dull and daily necessities.

What is there so offensive to which habit has not the power to reconcile us?

We're all shocked by new ideas, and we're less shocked when we hear them again. And less shocked when we hear them a third time.

I'm used to the Journey routine now.

You can get used to eating breakfast with a man in a fedora. You can get used to anything, my mother was in the habit of saying.

Long habit so reconciles us to almost any thing, that the grossest improprieties cease to strike us when they once make a part of the common course of action.

It is an error to suppose that courage means courage in everything. Most people are brave only in the dangers to which they accustom themselves, either in imagination or practice.

I don't need to be told the same thing every day, every morning, same words.

A miracle is a violation of the laws of nature; and as a firm and unalterable experience has established these laws, the proof against a miracle, from the very nature of the fact, is as entire as any argument from experience can possibly be imagined.

So true is that unnatural generally means only uncustomary, and that everything which is usual appears natural.

I think certain types of processes don’t allow for any variation. If you have to be part of that process, all you can do is transform—or perhaps distort—yourself through that persistent repetition, and make that process a part of your own personality.

When you do not change up a lot, people may know you a lot better than they should.

...we can only add to the world, where we believe it ends, more parts similar to those we already know (an expanse made again and always of water and land, stars and skies).

How quickly one accepts the incredible if only one sees it enough.

There is nothing that God hath established in a constant course of nature, and which therefore is done every day, but would seem a Miracle, and exercise our admiration, if it were done but once.

Habit! that skilful but slow-moving arranger who begins by letting our minds suffer for weeks on end in temporary quarters, but whom our minds are none the less only too happy to discover at last, for without it, reduced to their own devices, they would be powerless to make any room seem habitable.

There are terrible things that never get easier, and there are things even more terrible that get easier with time and repetition.

Nothing is wonderful when you get used to it.

Habit! that skillful but slow arranger, which starts out by letting our spirit suffer for weeks in a temporary state, but that thespirit is after all happy to discover, for without habit and reduced to its own resources, the spirit would be unable to make any lodgings seem habitable.

For nature is an image of Grace, and visible miracles are images of the invisible.

I have climbed these steps so often I know each one by name.

the mind naturally accommodates itself, even to the most ridiculous improprieties, if they occur frequently.

every day a million miracles begin at sunrise!

We human beings have a remarkable way of growing accustomed to things.

The frequent repetition of miracles serves to provoke, where it does not subdue, the reason of mankind.