Life & Wisdom Quote by Lyman Abbott

Nothing telegraphs cultivated taste quite like refusing to cultivate. Abbott’s line lands because it’s a confession dressed up as principle: he “abhors a hoe,” yet “is fond of flowers.” The joke isn’t just laziness; it’s a tidy little portrait of late-19th-century respectability, where appreciating beauty becomes a marker of refinement, while the labor that produces it gets pushed out of sight.

The phrasing does clever work. “Abhor” is a moral verb, overkill for a garden tool. By treating a hoe as an object of disgust, Abbott elevates his preference into something like virtue. Then he pivots to “had rather buy them than cultivate them,” the bluntest possible admission that money can replace effort. It’s an argument for consumer convenience before consumer convenience had a marketing department.

The subtext reads like class theater. In Abbott’s America, manual work is increasingly something other people do: hired hands, immigrants, the rural poor. Buying flowers lets the speaker keep the aesthetic payoff while maintaining clean hands and, crucially, clean status. “Not of dirt” is literal, but it also signals a fear of being associated with the gritty, unpolished world beneath genteel life.

Context matters: Abbott was a prominent Protestant writer and editor, a public moral voice. That makes the line sharper. It quietly undercuts the Protestant work ethic with an urbane shrug, suggesting that modernity’s real faith might be in markets: why sweat, when you can purchase the appearance of care?