Edwin H Chapin Quotes & Sayings

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. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The creed of a true saint is to make the best of life, and to make the most of it. — 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

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. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Hill and valley, seas and constellations, are but stereotypes of divine ideas appealing to and answered by the living soul of man. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars ... It is the light that hovers above the judgment seat. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

The essence of justice is mercy. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

There is such a thing as honest pride and self-respect. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A life of mere pleasure! A little while, in the spring-time of the senses, in the sunshine of prosperity, in the jubilee of health, it may seem well enough. But how insufficient, how mean, how terrible when age comes, and sorrow, and death! A life of pleasure! What does it look like when these great changes beat against it
when the realities of eternity stream in? It looks like the fragments of a feast, when the sun shines upon the withered garlands, and the tinsel, and the overturned tables, and the dead lees of wine. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

No language can express the power, and beauty, and heroism, and majesty of a mother's love. It shrinks not where man cowers, and grows stronger where man faints, and over wastes of worldly fortunes sends the radiance of its quenchless fidelity like a star. — 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

Some people habitually wear sadness, like a garment, and think it a becoming grace. God loves a cheerful worshipper. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Seeking Heaven through righteousness is not seeking righteousness, but something else;
it is not loving goodness for goodness' sake, but for its rewards. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

It takes something of a poet to apprehend and get into the depth, the lusciousness, the spiritual life of a great poem. And so we must be in some way like God in order that we may see God as He is. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

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

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. — 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

Impatience never commanded success. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

A patient, humble temper gathers blessings that are marred by the peevish and overlooked by the aspiring. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

The loss of fortune to a true man is but the trumpet challenge to renewed exertion, not the thunder stroke of destruction. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Morality is but the vestibule of religion. — Edwin Hubbel Chapin