Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
-
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.
-
For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.
-
Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death.
-
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.
-
Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man.
-
Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman, I care not what his stamp may be in society; I care not what clothes he wears, or what culture he boasts.
-
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.
-
The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement.... The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys.... Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find.
-
A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.
-
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.
-
We may learn by practice such things upon earth as shall be of use to us in heaven. Piety, unostentatious piety, is never out of place.
-
Labor, with its coarse raiment and its bare right arm, has gone forth in the earth, achieving the truest conquests and rearing the most durable monuments. It has opened the domain of matter and the empire of the mind. The wild beast has fled before it, and the wilderness has fallen back.... its triumphal march is the progress of civilization.
-
Revolution does not insure progress. You may overturn thrones, but what proof that anything better will grow upon the soil?
-
Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.
-
However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.
-
Do not ask if a man has been through college; ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university.
-
A life is black, whiten it as you will.
-
Temptation cannot exist without the concurrence of inclination and opportunity.
-
No one can truly see Christ, and drink in the influence of his character, and not be a Christian at heart.
-
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.
-
A man's love for his native land lies deeper than any logical expression, among those pulses of the heart which vibrate to the sanctities of home, and to the thoughts which leap up from his father's graves.
-
If you should take the human heart and listen to it, it would be like listening to a sea-shell; you would hear in it the hollow murmur of the infinite ocean to which it belongs, from which it draws its profoundest inspiration, and for which it yearns.
-
Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
-
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.