Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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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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Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.
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If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.
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A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring.
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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.
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Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.
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Life is a crucible. We are thrown into it and tried.
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This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.
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The true Church is not an institution to be kept apart from the world because the world "is common and unclean," but a vital heart of truth and love, beating with the life of Jesus, and sending abroad its sanctifying pulsations until nothing shall be common and unclean.
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Do not judge men by mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over the depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace and joy.
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As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.
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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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Death makes a beautiful appeal to charity. When we look upon the dead form, so composed and still, the kindness and the love that are in us all come forth.
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Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.
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There are interests by the sacrifice of which peace is too dearly purchased. One should never be at peace to the shame of his own soul--to the violation of his integrity or of his allegiance to God.
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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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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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Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight-behind the veil of glittering constellations.
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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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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.
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A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.
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The excellence and inspiration of truth is in the pursuit, not in the mere having of it. The pursuit of all truth is a kind of gymnastics; a man swings from one truth with higher strength to gain another. The continual glory is the possibility opening before us.
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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.
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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.