Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
-
Truth is poetry; it is the grandest poetry.
-
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?
-
Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.
-
Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.
-
No piled-up wealth, no social station, no throne, reaches as high as that spiritual plane upon which every human being stands by virtue of his humanity.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.
-
Neutral men are the devil's allies.
-
Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.
-
If one's conscience be dead as a stone, it is as heavy too.
-
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.
-
Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.
-
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.
-
The productions of the press, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snowflakes, but potent as thunder. It is an additional tongue of steam and lightning, by which a man speaks his first thought, his instant argument or grievance, to millions in a day.
-
There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.
-
A thousand wheels of labor are turned by dear affections, and kept in motion by self-sacrificing endurance; and the crowds that pour forth in the morning and return at night are daily procession of love and duty.
-
Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;--it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards.
-
Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.
-
Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
-
The night comes for the purpose of checking our busy employment, and introducing an interval of repose between the links of our action and our aspiration. It draws its dim curtain around the field of toil. It buries the objects of our handiwork in darkness, and involves them with uncertainty. It comes to the relief of the exhausted body and the tired brain. Our powers, harmonizing with the diurnal revolutions of the earth, fail with the failing light, and a merciful Providence casts around us this mantle of shadow, and snatches us from our occupation.