Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
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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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If one's conscience be dead as a stone, it is as heavy too.
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Truth is new, as well as old. It has new forms; and where you may find a new statement, an earnest statement, you may conclude that by the law of progress it is more likely to be a correct statement than that which has been repeated for ages by the lips of tradition.
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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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Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
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Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
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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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The mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy; at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch chain; and, if he is allowed any real precedence for this it is almost a moral swindle,--a way of obtaining goods under false pretences.
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The deepest life of nature is silent and obscure; so often the elements that move and mould society are the results of the sister's counsel and the mother's prayer.
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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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Mercy. That is the gospel. The whole of it in one word.
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Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
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Neutral men are the devil's allies.
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There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.
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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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Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.
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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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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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Liberty is an old fact; it has had its heroes and its martyrs in almost every age. As I look back through the vista of centuries, I can see no end of the ranks of those who have toiled and suffered in its cause, and who wear upon their breasts its stars of the legion of honor.
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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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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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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.
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Even yet Christ Jesus has to lie out in waste places very often, because there is no room for him in the inn--no room for him in our hearts, because of our worldliness. There is no room for him even in our politics and religion. There is no room in the inn, and we put him in the manger, and he lies outside our faith, coldly and dimly conceived by us.
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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.