Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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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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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.
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What a proof of the Divine tenderness is there in the human heart itself, which is the organ and receptacle oft so many sympathies! When we consider how exquisite are those conditions by which it is even made capable of so much suffering--the capabilities of a child's heart, of a mother's heart,--what must be the nature of Him who fashioned its depths, and strung its chords.
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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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No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and sorrow.
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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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The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction.
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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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The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.
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No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.
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Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.
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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.
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God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.
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We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.
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The wild bird that flies so lone and far has somewhere its nest and brood. A little fluttering heart of love impels its wings, and points its course. There is nothing so solitary as a solitary man.
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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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How much in this world is charged to chance or fortune, or veiled under a more devout name, and accorded to Providence; while, when we come to look honestly into affairs, we find it to be a debt of our own accumulation, and one which we must inevitably pay.
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The temptation is not here, where you are reading about it or praying about it. It is down in your shop, among bales and boxes, ten-penny nails, and sand-paper.
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Why, man of idleness, labor has rocked you in the cradle, and nourished your pampered life; without it, the woven silk and the wool upon your bank would be in the shepherd's fold. For the meanest thing that ministers to human want, save the air of heaven, man is indebted to toil; and even the air, in God's wise ordination, is breathed with labor.
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At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.
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It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.
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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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We move too much in platoons; we march by sections; we do not live in our vital individuality enough; we are slaves to fashion, in mind and in heart, if not to our passions and appetites.
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Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.