Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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Neutral men are the devil's allies.
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Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
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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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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.
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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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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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There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.
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There is less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.
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Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;--it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards.
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In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.
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Whatever you truly conceive of in the mind, is possible.
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It is because we underrate thought, because we do not see what a great element it is in religious life, that there is so little of practical and consistent religion among us.
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However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.
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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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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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Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
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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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Our life is what we make it. An insignificant game or a noble trial; a dream or a reality; a play of the senses worn out in selfish use, and flying "swifter than a weaver's shuttle," or an ascension of the soul, by daily duties and unfaltering faith, to more spiritual relations and to loftier toils.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.
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Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.