Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
-
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.
-
The city an epitome of the social world. All the belts of civilization intersect along its avenues. It contains the products of every moral zone. It is cosmopolitan, not only in a national, but a spiritual sense.
-
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.
-
We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.
-
Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.
-
The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.
-
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.
-
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.
-
The devil has been painted swarthy, cloven-footed, horned, and hideous. Do we expect to see him in that shape? O, surely it would be better for us, if he did come in that shape! The trouble is the devil never does come in that shape. He comes by chance, with unregistered signals, and in all sorts of counterfeit presentiments.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
-
For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
-
There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.
-
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.
-
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.
-
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.
-
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.
-
As for environments, the kingliest being ever born in the flesh lay in a manger.
-
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.
-
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
-
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.
-
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
-
Conscience is its own readiest accuser.