It is in vain for us to devise schemes by which…

“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.”

Lyman Abbott

About This Quote

This interpretation was drafted with AI assistance. It is one reading of the quote, not the author's own explanation.

Attempting to eliminate competition is futile; competition is an inherent life condition.

In simple terms: Competition cannot be removed.

Key Takeaway

Accept and channel competition positively.

Themes

competition life strategy

Mood

thoughtful analytical

Type

philosophical strategic

When to use this quote

business
sports
education

Key Concepts

economics philosophy

Questions to Reflect On

How can competition be harnessed constructively?
What alternatives exist to pure competition?

A Different Perspective

Competition can be destructive if misused.

★ ★ ★ ★ ★ No ratings yet

More by Lyman Abbott

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

Lyman Abbott

We Gentiles owe our life to Israel. It is Israel who has brought us the message that God is one, and that God is…

Lyman Abbott

If the impure and the unjust, the drunkard and the licentious, are loathsome to us, what must be the infinite loathing of an infinitely…

Lyman Abbott

I abhor a hoe. I am fond of flowers but not of dirt, and had rather buy them than cultivate them.

Lyman Abbott

If I am to tell you how to grow old gracefully, I must tell you at the beginning of life; for no man can…

Lyman Abbott

Courage is caution overcome.

Lyman Abbott

It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity.

Lyman Abbott

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

Lyman Abbott

A graceful and blessed old age must have three elements in it: a happy retrospect, a peaceful present, and an inspiring future. And old…

Lyman Abbott

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

Lyman Abbott

I think of death as a glad awakening from this troubled sleep which we call life; as an emancipation from a world, which, beautiful…

Lyman Abbott

A miracle constantly repeated becomes a process of nature.

Lyman Abbott

Evolution does not attempt to explain the origin of life. It is simply a history of the process of life. With the secret cause…

Lyman Abbott

A miracle no longer seems to me a manifestation of extraordinary power, but an extraordinary manifestation of ordinary power. God is always showing himself.

Lyman Abbott

Postmodernism represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange…

Lyman Abbott

Explore all 54 Lyman Abbott quotes

More Civilized quotes

That country [Carthage] was rapidly sinking into the state of barbarism from whence it had been raised by the Phoenician colonies and Roman laws;…

Edward Gibbon

Be neither too early in the fashion, nor too long out of it, nor too precisely in it; what custom hath civilized is become…

Francis Quarles

Wine is one of the most civilized things in the world and one of the most natural things of the world that has been…

Ernest Hemingway

Civilized nations are ones that simply can't endure wrongs or injustice except at home

Joseph Anderson

Our guiding principle was that design is neither an intellectual nor a material affair, but simply an integral part of the stuff of life,…

Walter Gropius

War is not civilized.

Talib Kweli

For it is an absurdity to call a country civilized in which a decent and industrious man, laboriously mastering a trade which is valuble…

H. L. Mencken

No people is wholly civilized where a distinction is drawn between stealing an office and stealing a purse.

Theodore Roosevelt

Mine was, as it were, the connecting link between wild and cultivated fields; as some states are civilized, and others half-civilized, and others savage…

Henry David Thoreau

The military mind is indeed a menace. Old-fashioned futurity that sees only men fighting and dying in smoke and fire; hears nothing more civilized…

Sean O'Casey

As long as there are prisons, police, armies, navies; we are not civilized. When the Earth joins together and uses the Earth intelligently, that…

Jacque Fresco

We're all intrigued, in our civilized world that we live in, and curious about how we would get on, on an undiscovered island that…

Tom Hiddleston

When passions and appetites are stronger than the intellect, men are savages; when the intellect governs the passions, when the passions are servants, men…

Robert Green Ingersoll