Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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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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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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No one can truly see Christ, and drink in the influence of his character, and not be a Christian at heart.
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Patriotism! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary-a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our worldwide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.
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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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A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring.
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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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For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
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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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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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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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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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Conscience is its own readiest accuser.
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Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death.
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Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
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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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Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.
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How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.
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Each thing lives according to its kind; the heart by love, the intellect by truth, the higher nature of man by intimate communion with God.
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The conservative may clamor against reform, but he might as well clamor against the centrifugal force. He sighs for the "good old times,"--he might as well wish the oak back into the acorn.
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If angels stoop from visions of more than earthly beauty to spells of less than earthly worth, they are but fallen angels, mingling divine utterances with the babblings of madness, and the madness is not the divineness.
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A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it--when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine.
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Life, whether in this world or any other, is the sum of our attainment, our experience, our character. The conditions are secondary. In what other world shall we be more surely than we are here?
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Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.