Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
-
It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature.
-
We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!
-
The child's grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man's sorrow, and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.
-
Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.
-
The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.
-
He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.
-
Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.
-
Impatience never commanded success.
-
The church-bells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity.
-
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.
-
No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
-
Home is the seminary of all other institutions.
-
Certainly, truth should be strenuous and bold; but the strongest things are not always the noisiest, as any one may see who compares scolding with logic.
-
It is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill.
-
A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.
-
We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union--a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.
-
Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.
-
We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God's help and Christ's example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.
-
Nature satisfies my thirst; it feeds my hunger; it finds me clothing; it affords me shelter; it wraps me around when I sleep with beneficent and watchful care; and it takes me at last to its great bosom, where my ashes mingle with their kindred dust.
-
No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.
-
The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.
-
Some souls are ennobled and elevated by seeming misfortunes, which then become blessings in disguise.
-
Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.
-
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.