Quotes from Edwin Hubbel Chapin

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

The essence of justice is mercy.

Not in achievement, but in endurance, of the human soul, does it show its divine grandeur and its alliance with the infinite.

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

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

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

The unmerciful man is most certainly an unblessed man. His sympathies are all dried up; he is afflicted with a chronic jaundice, and lives timidly and darkly in a little, narrow rat-hole of distrust.

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.

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 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.

This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.

Whatever touches the nerves of motive, whatever shifts man's moral position, is mightier than steam, or calorie, or lightening.

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

There have been men who could play delightful music on one string of the violin, but there never was a man who could produce the harmonies of heaven in his soul by a one-stringed virtue.

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.

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

Is there anything so wretched as to look at a man of fine abilities doing nothing?

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

Impatience dries the blood sooner than age or sorrow.

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.

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

This is the essential evil of vice, that it debases man.

Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.

Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury