Life & Wisdom Quote by Lyman Abbott

“It is easy to condemn, it is better to pity” works because it flatters no one. Abbott isn’t praising pity as a sentimental virtue; he’s setting a trap for our most automatic moral reflex: judgment. “Easy” lands like a quiet accusation. Condemnation is effortless because it converts complexity into a verdict. It lets the condemner feel clean, decisive, and superior in a single stroke. Abbott’s line implies that moral certainty can be a kind of laziness, a shortcut that spares us the harder work of imagining how people end up where they are.

“Better” is equally strategic. He doesn’t say pity is truer or more righteous; he says it’s better, as in more useful, more humane, more spiritually mature. That word shifts the discussion from abstract right-and-wrong to outcomes and character: what kind of person do you become when you condemn, and what kind of community do you help build?

The subtext is religious but not preachy. As a prominent Protestant writer and public moral voice in late 19th-century America, Abbott was shaped by a social gospel sensibility: faith measured in public ethics, not private purity. In an era obsessed with respectability and eager to divide the “deserving” from the “undeserving” poor, the sentence pushes against the moral bookkeeping of modern life. Pity, here, is not indulgence; it’s a demand for proximity. It asks you to look long enough that blame stops being entertainment and starts feeling insufficient.