Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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Some souls are ennobled and elevated by seeming misfortunes, which then become blessings in disguise.
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The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction with the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.
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No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother's love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over wastes of worldly fortunes sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star.
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There are daily martyrdoms occurring of more or less self-abnegation, and of which the world knows nothing.
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Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars ... It is the light that hovers above the judgment seat.
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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.
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Impatience never commanded success.
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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.
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The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.
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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.
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Gaiety is often the reckless ripple over depths of despair.
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Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God's nature as the idea of peace?
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Humility is not a weak and timid quality; it must be carefully distinguished from a groveling spirit.
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Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.
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No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
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The individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.
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Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.
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There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.
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Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skeptical.
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A day! It has risen upon us from the great deep of eternity, girt round with wonder; emerging from the womb of darkness; a new creation of life and light spoken into being by the word of God.
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When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good.
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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.
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Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.
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A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.