Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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It is the penalty of fame that a man must ever keep rising. "Get a reputation, and then go to bed," is the absurdest of all maxims. "Keep up a reputation or go to bed, "would be nearer the truth.
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Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
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Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed,--a Columbus of the skies.
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It is a most fearful fact to think of, that in every heart there is some secret spring that would be weak at the touch of temptation, and that is liable to be assailed. Fearful, and yet salutary to think of; for the thought may serve to keep our moral nature braced. It warns us that we can never stand at ease, or lie down in this field of life, without sentinels of watchfulness and campfires of prayer.
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All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disk of infinite light.
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Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.
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In the matter of faith, we have the added weight of hope to that of reason in the convictions which we sustain relating to a future state.
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O, how much those men are to be valued who, in the spirit with which the widow gave up her two mites, have given up themselves! How their names sparkle! How rich their very ashes are! How they will count up in heaven!
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Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.
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Conscience is its own readiest accuser.
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Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
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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.
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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.
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There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.
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Munificent nature follows the methods of the divine and true, and rounds all things to her perfect law. While nations are convulsed with blood and violence, how quietly the grass grows.
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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.
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Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
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Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals.
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Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it and tried.
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Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
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For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
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Many a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes.
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Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
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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.