Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes - Page 5

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.

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.

It is not death to have the body called back to the earth, and dissolved into its kindred elements, and mouldered to dust, and, it may be, turn to daisies, in the grave. But it is death to have the soul paralyzed, its inner life quenched, its faculties dissipated; that is death.

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.

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

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.

It is those who make the least display of their sorrow who mourn the deepest.

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.

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.

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.

Humanity is so constituted that the basest criminal represents you and me, as well as the most glorious saint that walks on high. We are reflected in all other men; all other men are embodied in us.

When I contrast the loving Jesus, comprehending all things in his ample and tender charity, with those who profess to bear his name, marking their zeal by what they do not love, it seems to me as though men, like the witches of old, had read the Bible backward, and had taken incantations out of it for evil, rather than inspiration for good.

There is no doubt of the essential nobility of that man who pours into life the honest vigor of his toil, over those who compose the feathery foam of fashion that sweeps along Broadway; who consider the insignia of honor to consist in wealth and indolence; and who, ignoring the family history, paint coats of arms to cover up the leather aprons of their grandfathers.

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

It is the veiled angel of sorrow who plucks away one thing and another that bound us here in ease and security, and, in the vanishing of these dear objects, indicates the true home of our affections and our peace.

An aged Christian, with the snow of time upon his head, may remind us that those points of earth are whitest which are nearest to heaven.

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.

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

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.

Those old ages are like the landscape that shows best in purple distance, all verdant and smooth, and bathed in mellow light.

The child's grief throbs against the round of its little heart as heavily as the man's sorrow, and the one finds as much delight in his kite or drum as the other in striking the springs of enterprise or soaring on the wings of fame.

Conscience is its own readiest accuser.

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

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 less misery in being cheated than in that kind of wisdom which perceives, or thinks it perceives, that all mankind are cheats.