Edwin Hubbell Chapin Quotes
-
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.
-
No one can truly see Christ, and drink in the influence of his character, and not be a Christian at heart.
-
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?
-
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.
-
Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.
-
Morality is but the vestibule of religion.
-
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.
-
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.
-
If one's conscience be dead as a stone, it is as heavy too.
-
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.
-
There is a sweet anguish springing up in our bosoms when a child's face brightens under the shadow of the waiting angel. There is an autumnal fitness when age gives up the ghost; and when the saint dies there is a tearful victory.
-
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.
-
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.
-
There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.
-
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.
-
The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;--it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.