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There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Impatience never commanded success.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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The weak sinews become strong by their conflict with difficulties.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
I will tell you where there is power: where the dew lies upon the hills, and the rain has moistened the roots of the various plant; where the sunshine pours steadily; where the brook runs babbling along, there is a beneficent power.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Many a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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Home is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite-a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
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.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin
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The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
It is the veiled angel of sorrow who plucks away one thing and another that bound us here in ease and security, and, in the vanishing of these dear objects, indicates the true home of our affections and our peace.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
Life is a problem. Not merely a premiss from which we start, but a goal towards which we proceed. It is an opportunity for us not merely to get, but to attain; not simply to have, but to be. Its standard of failure or success is not outward fortune, but inward possession.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin -
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
Edwin Hubbell Chapin