Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

“Goodness is richer than greatness. It consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Every action of your life touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Neutral men are the devil's allies.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“The essence of justice is mercy.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Not only is music a beautiful and sublime science, the study of which ennobles and purifies the mind of its votary, but how many and excellent are its ministries to others!

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“A life is black, whiten it as you will.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God's help and Christ's example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Death makes a beautiful appeal to charity. When we look upon the dead form, so composed and still, the kindness and the love that are in us all come forth.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“The mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy; at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch chain; and, if he is allowed any real precedence for this it is almost a moral swindle,
a way of obtaining goods under false pretences.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Christianity has made martyrdom sublime, and sorrow triumphant.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“O, how much those men are to be valued who, in the spirit with which the widow gave up her two mites, have given up themselves! How their names sparkle! How rich their very ashes are! How they will count up in heaven!”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Think for a moment of the great agents and engines of our civilization, and then think what shadowy ideas they all once were. The wheels of the steamship turned as swiftly as they do now, but as silent and unsubstantial as the motions of the inventor's thought; and in the noiseless loom of his meditation were woven the sinews of the printing-press, whose thunder shakes the world.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Do not ask if a man has been through college; ask if a college has been through him; if he is a walking university.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“We do not compromise our own faith by admitting the honesty of another's doubt.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“However logical our induction, the end of the thread is fastened upon the assurance of faith.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Many a man who might walk over burning ploughshares into heaven stumbles from the path because there is gravel in his shoes.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“There is no tariff so injurious as that with which sectarian bigotry guards its commodities. It dwarfs the soul by shutting out truths from other continents of thought, and checks the circulation of its own.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Let every man be free to act from his own conscience; but let him remember that other people have consciences too; and let not his liberty be so expansive that in its indulgence it jars and crashes against the liberty of others.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Character has more effect than anything else. Let a number of loud-talking men take up a particular question, and one man of character, of known integrity and beauty of soul, will outweigh them all in his influence.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

We only attain the true idea of marriage when we consider it as a spiritual union
a union of immortal affections, of undying faculties, of an imperishable destiny.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Impatience never commanded success.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Morality is but the vestibule of religion.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Death is a great revealer of what is in a man, and in its solemn shadow appear the naked lineaments of the soul.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Man was sent into the world to be a growing and exhaustless force. The world was spread out around him to be seized and conquered. Realms of infinite truth burst open above him, inviting him to tread those shining coasts along which Newton dropped his plummet, and Herschel sailed,
a Columbus of the skies.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“Earth has scarcely an acre that does not remind us of actions that have long preceded our own, and its clustering tombstones loom up like reefs of the eternal shore, to show us where so many human barks have struck and gone down.”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

“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!”

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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?

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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.

— Edwin Hubbel Chapin