Edwin A. Abbott Quotes

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.

Feeling is believing’ and ‘A Straight Line to the touch is worth a Circle to the sight’” — two Proverbs, very common with the Frailer Sex in Flatland.

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

"Once a Woman, always a Woman" is a Decree of Nature; and the very Laws of Evolution seem suspended in her disfavour. 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.

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

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!

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.

and a more perfect Circle than any in Flatland; but to speak more accurately, I am many Circles in one.

Sphere: […] 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?

It is considered a disgrace to any State that legislation should have to enforce what ought to be, and is in every respectable female, a natural instinct.

¡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! Os vanagloráis de deducir la existencia de una línea recta; pero yo puedo ver líneas rectas y deducir la existencia de ángulos, triángulos, cuadrados, pentágonos, hexágonos e incluso círculos. ¿Por qué desperdiciar más palabras? Basta con decir que soy la plenitud de vuestro yo incompleto. Vois sois una línea, pero yo soy una línea de líneas, lo que en mi país se llama un cuadrado: e incluso yo, pese a ser infinitamente superior a vos, soy poca cosa entre los grandes nobles de Planilandia, de donde he venido a visitaros, con la esperanza de iluminar vuestra ignorancia.

You, who are blessed with shade as well as light, you, who are gifted with two eyes, endowed with a knowledge of perspective, and charmed with the enjoyment of various colours, you, who can actually see an angle, and contemplate the complete circumference of a Circle in the happy region of the Three Dimensions — how shall I make clear to you the extreme difficulty which we in Flatland experience in recognizing one another’s configuration?

I looked, and, behold, a new world!

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;

They speak about 'right' or 'wrong' as vehemently and passionately as if they believed that these names represented real existences, and that a human figure is really capable of choosing between them.