Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

Whatever may be our condition in life, it is better to lay hold of its advantages than to count its evils.

The devil has been painted swarthy, cloven-footed, horned, and hideous. Do we expect to see him in that shape? O, surely it would be better for us, if he did come in that shape! The trouble is the devil never does come in that shape. He comes by chance, with unregistered signals, and in all sorts of counterfeit presentiments.

Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.

He who today utters a bold truth that seems to shock some old institution with the premonition of destruction, and that scares men from their propriety, will a hundred years hence be regarded as a remarkably conservative man. And yet the people who stand peculiarly upon what they call the foundations of conservatism, and hold to hard, practical facts, now stand upon that which one hundred years ago was rank heresy.

Ostentation is the signal flag of hypocrisy.

The wild bird that flies so lone and far has somewhere its nest and brood. A little fluttering heart of love impels its wings, and points its course. There is nothing so solitary as a solitary man.

Genius is the accumulated wealth of our humanity--its most intense development concentrated at one point, and then with clearer expression and with mysterious power shot back to us across the galvanic lines of thought and feeling.

If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.

Home is the seminary of all other institutions.

If one's conscience be dead as a stone, it is as heavy too.

Break up the institution of the family, deny the inviolability of its relations, and in a little while there would not be any humanity.

The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction with the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.

Do not judge from mere appearances.

A life is black, whiten it as you will.

To me there is something thrilling and exalting in the thought that we are drifting forward into a splendid mystery-into something that no mortal eye hath yet seen, and no intelligence has yet declared.

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 city reveals the moral ends of being, and sets the awful problem of life. The country soothes us, refreshes us, lifts us up with religious suggestion.

It is difficult to believe that a true gentleman will ever become a gamester, a libertine, or a sot.

God's beneficence streams out from the morning sun, and his love looks down upon us from the starry eyes of midnight. It is his solicitude that wraps us in the air, and the pressure of his hand, so to speak, that keeps our pulses beating. O! it is a great thing to realize that the Divine Power is always working; that nature, in every valve and every artery, is full of the presence of God.

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.

God's work is freedom. Freedom is dear to his heart. He wishes to make man's will free, and at the same time wishes it to be pure, majestic, and holy.

The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.

Profaneness is a brutal vice. He who indulges in it is no gentleman.

Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.

The bosom can ache beneath diamond brooches; and many a blithe heart dances under coarse wool.

The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.

Under the shadow of earthly disappointment, all unconscious to ourselves, our Divine Redeemer is walking by our side.

The worst effect of sin is within and is manifest not in poverty, and pain, and bodily defacement, but in the discrowned faculties, the unworthy love, the low ideal, the brutalized and enslaved spirit.

The gospel has but a forced alliance with war. Its doctrine of human brotherhood would ring strangely between the opposed ranks. The bellowing speech of cartoon and the baptism of blood mock its liturgies and sacraments. Its gentle beatitudes would hardly serve as mottoes for defiant banners, nor its list of graces as names for ships-of-the-line.

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.

Skepticism has never founded empires, established principals, or changed the world's heart. The great doers in history have always been people of faith.

All natural results are spontaneous. The diamond sparkles without effort, and the flowers open impulsively beneath the summer rain. And true religion is a spontaneous thing,--as natural as it is to weep, to love, or to rejoice.

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.

Pure felicity is reserved for the heavenly life; it grows not in an earthly soil.

Honor to the idealists, whether philosophers or poets. They have improved us by mingling with our daily pursuits great and transcendent conceptions. They have thrown around our sensual life the grandeur of a better, and drawn us up from contacts with the temporal and the selfish to communion with beauty and truth and goodness.

I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.

God is the explanation of all things.

In this world the inclination to do things is of more importance than the mere power.

There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.

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.

There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect.

In the matter of faith, we have the added weight of hope to that of reason in the convictions which we sustain relating to a future state.

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.

Consider and act with reference to the true ends of existence. This world is but the vestibule of an immortal life. Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.

It is a mistake to consider marriage merely as a scheme of happiness. It is also a bond of service. It is the most ancient form of that social ministration which God has ordained for all human beings, and which is symbolized by all the relations of nature.

The individual and the race are always moving, and as we drift into new latitudes new lights open in the heaven more immediately over us.

Heaven never defaults. The wicked are sure of their wages, sooner or later.

Into what boundless life, does education admit us. Every truth gained through it expands a moment of time into illimitable being--positively enlarges our existence, and endows us with qualities which time cannot weaken or destroy.