Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

In the history of man it has been very generally the case that when evils have grown insufferable they have touched the point of cure.

Pride is the master sin of the devil, and the devil is the father of lies.

The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence.

It is as bad to clip conscience as to clip coin; it is as bad to give a counterfeit statement as a counterfeit bill.

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.

Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.

There is no happiness in life, there is no misery like that growing out of the dispositions which consecrate or desecrate a home.

Can you conceive of anything that so represents the glory, and truth, and marvelousness of God's nature as the idea of peace?

The more we sympathize with excellence, the more we go out of self, the more we love, the broader and deeper is our personality.

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.

Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.

Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.

Let us not fear that the issues of natural science shall be scepticism or anarchy. Through all God's works there runs a beautiful harmony. The remotest truth in his universe is linked to that which lies nearest the Throne.

Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.

Mercy. That is the gospel. The whole of it in one word.

Influence is exerted by every human being from the hour of birth to that of death.

A man that simply loads himself down with possessions of which he has no actual need, when he dies slips out of them--as a little insect might slip out of some parasite shell into which it has ensconced itself--into the grave, and is forgotten.

All evil, in fact the very existence of evil, is inexplicable until we refer to the paternity of God. It hangs a huge blot in the universe until the orb of divine love rises behind it. In that apposition we detect its meaning. It appears to us but a finite shadow as it passes across the disk of infinite light.

Swift calls discretion low prudence; it is high prudence, and one of the most important elements entering into either social or political life.

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.

No language can express the power and beauty and heroism of a mother's love.

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.

A great many men - some comparatively small men now - if put in the right position, would be Luthers and Columbuses.

The sluices of the grog-shop are fed from the wine-glasses in the parlor, and there is a lineal descent from the gentleman who hiccoughs at his elegant dinner-table to the sot who makes a bed of the gutter.

We must die alone. To the very verge of the stream our friends may accompany us; they may bend over us, they may cling to us there; but that one long wave from the sea of eternity washes up to the lips, sweeps us from the shore, and we go forth alone! In that untried and utter solitude, then, what can there be for us but the pulsation of that assurance, "I am not alone, because the Father is with me!

It is a most fearful fact to think of, that in every heart there is some secret spring that would be weak at the touch of temptation, and that is liable to be assailed. Fearful, and yet salutary to think of; for the thought may serve to keep our moral nature braced. It warns us that we can never stand at ease, or lie down in this field of life, without sentinels of watchfulness and campfires of prayer.

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.

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.

No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.

Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.

What a proof of the Divine tenderness is there in the human heart itself, which is the organ and receptacle oft so many sympathies! When we consider how exquisite are those conditions by which it is even made capable of so much suffering--the capabilities of a child's heart, of a mother's heart,--what must be the nature of Him who fashioned its depths, and strung its chords.

Why, man of idleness, labor has rocked you in the cradle, and nourished your pampered life; without it, the woven silk and the wool upon your bank would be in the shepherd's fold. For the meanest thing that ministers to human want, save the air of heaven, man is indebted to toil; and even the air, in God's wise ordination, is breathed with labor.

There are daily martyrdoms occurring of more or less self-abnegation, and of which the world knows nothing.

How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

At the bottom of not a little of the bravery that appears in the world, there lurks a miserable cowardice. Men will face powder and steel because they have not the courage to face public opinion.

Truth is the root, but human sympathy is the flower of practical life.

Down below all the crust of human conceptions, of human ideas, Christ sank an artesian well into a source of happiness so pure and blessed that even yet the world does not believe in it.

Christ saw much in this world to weep over, and much to pray over: but he saw nothing in it to look upon with contempt.

Christ illustrates the purport of life as He descends from His transfiguration to toil, and goes forward to exchange that robe of heavenly brightness for the crown of thorns.

The angels may have wider spheres of action, may have nobler forms of duty; but right with them and with us is one and the same thing.

The church-bells of innumerable sects are all chime-bells to-day, ringing in sweet accordance throughout many lands, and awaking a great joy in the heart of our common humanity.

The best men are not those who have waited for chances but who have taken them; besieged the chance; conquered the chance; and made chance the servitor.

The universe is a vast system of exchange. Every artery of it is in motion, throbbing with reciprocity, from the planet to the rotting leaf.

Through every rift of discovery some seeming anomaly drops out of the darkness, and falls, as a golden link into the great chain of order.

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

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?

Physically, man is but an atom in space, and a pulsation in time. Spiritually, the entire outward universe receives significance from him, and the scope of his existence stretches beyond the stars.

Public feeling now is apt to side with the persecuted, and our modern martyr is full as likely to be smothered with roses as with coals.