Edwin Hubbel Chapin
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.Collection: Forgiveness
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.Collection: Courage
Poetry is the utterance of deep and heart-felt truth - the true poet is very near the oracle.Collection: Poetry
Neutral men are the devil's allies.Collection: Men
The downright fanatic is nearer to the heart of things than the cool and slippery disputant.Collection: Cool
The creed of a true saint is to make the best of life, and to make the most of it.Collection: Best
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.Collection: Beauty
Every action of our lives touches on some chord that will vibrate in eternity.Collection: Inspiring
Do not judge from mere appearances.Collection: Judging
Tomorrow may never come to us. We do not live in tomorrow. We cannot find it in any of our title-deeds. The man who owns whole blocks of real estate, and great ships on the sea, does not own a single minute of tomorrow. Tomorrow! It is a mysterious possibility, not yet born. It lies under the seal of midnight-behind the veil of glittering constellations.Collection: Block
Glorify a lie, legalize a lie, arm and equip a lie, consecrate a lie with solemn forms and awful penalties, and after all it is nothing but a lie. It rots a land and corrupts a people like any other lie, and by and by the white light of God's truth shines clear through it, and shows it to be a lie.Collection: Lying
There is but a slight difference between the man who may be said to know nothing and him who thinks he knows everything.Collection: Knowledge
Courage is always greatest when blended with meekness; intellectual ability is most admirable when it sparkles in the setting of a modest self-distrust; and never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge and dares to forgive an injury.Collection: Courage
Goodness consists not in the outward things we do, but in the inward thing we are.Collection: Inspirational
The way to overcome evil is to love something that is good.Collection: Evil
Impatience never commanded success.Collection: Inspirational
Tribulation will not hurt you, unless as it too often does; it hardens you and makes you sour, narrow and skepticalCollection: Hurt
The greatest successes grow out of great failures. In numerous instances the result is better that comes after a series of abortive experiences than it would have been if it had come at once; for all these successive failures induce a skill which is so much additional power working into the final achievement.... The hand that evokes such perfect music from the instrument has often failed in its touch, and bungled among the keys.... Every disappointed effort fences in and indicates the only possible path of success, and makes it easier to find.Collection: Keys
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.Collection: Taken
In some way the secret vice exhales its poison; and the evil passion, however cunningly masked, stains through to the surface.Collection: Passion
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.Collection: Ocean
No man knows the genuineness of his convictions until he has sacrificed something for them.Collection: Men
The soul, like the body, acquires vigor by the exercise of all its faculties. In the midst of the world, in overcoming difficulties, in conquering selfishness, indolence, and fear--in all the occasions of duty, it employs, and reveals by employing, energies that render it efficient and robust--that broaden its scope, adjust its powers, and mature it with a rich experience.Collection: Exercise
Never does the human soul appear so strong as when it foregoes revenge, and dares to forgive an injury.Collection: Inspirational
If we would induce others to act virtuously, it will prove more effectual to show them their capacities than to expose their weakness--to attract them by a fairer ideal than to terrify them by pictures of misery and shame.Collection: Weakness
Death, is not an end, but a transition crisis. All the forms of decay are but masks of regeneration--the secret alembics of vitality.Collection: Death
Mercy among the virtues is like the moon among the stars ... It is the light that hovers above the judgment seat.Collection: Stars
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. The vapor climbs the sunbeam, and comes back in blessings upon the exhausted herb. The exhalation of the plant is wafted to the ocean. And so goes on the beautiful commerce of nature. And all because of dissimilarity--because no one thing is sufficient in itself, but calls for the assistance of something else, and repays by a contribution in turn.Collection: Beautiful
Books! The chosen depositories of the thoughts, the opinions, and the aspirations of mighty intellects; like wondrous mirrors that have caught and fixed bright images of souls that have passed away; like magic lyres, whose masters have bequeathed them to the world, and which yet, of themselves, ring with unforgotten music, while the hands that touched their chords have crumbled into dust. Books! they are the embodiments and manifestations of departed minds--the living organs through which those who are dead yet speak to us.Collection: Book
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.Collection: Spring
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.Collection: Men
This is the essential evil of vice: it debases a man.Collection: Men
Setting is preliminary to brighter rising; decay is a process of advancement; death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Peace
Patriotism! It is used to define so many diversities, to justify so many wrongs, to compass so many ends, that its life is killed out; it becomes a dead word in the vocabulary-a blank counter, to be moved to any part of the game; and that flag which, streaming from the mast-head of our ship of state, striped with martyr-blood, and glistening with the stars of lofty promise, should always indicate our worldwide mission, and the glorious destinies that we carry forward, is bandied about in every selfish skirmish, and held up as the symbol of every political privateer.Collection: Stars
For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.Collection: Death
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.Collection: Stars
We have not the innocence of Eden; but by God's help and Christ's example we may have the victory of Gethsemane.Collection: Eden
Modest expression is a beautiful setting to the diamond of talent and genius.Collection: Beautiful
Death is the condition of higher and more fruitful life.Collection: Death
The more we sympathize with excellence, the more we go out of self, the more we love, the broader and deeper is our personality.Collection: Self
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.Collection: Beautiful
Mercy. That is the gospel. The whole of it in one word.Collection: Mercy
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.Collection: Stars
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.Collection: Love
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.Collection: Light
There must be something beyond man in this world. Even on attaining to his highest possibilities, he is like a bird beating against his cage. There is something beyond, O deathless like a sea-shell, moaning for the bosom of the ocean to which you belong!Collection: Ocean
Temptation cannot exist without the concurrence of inclination and opportunity.Collection: Opportunity
Do not judge men by mere appearances; for the light laughter that bubbles on the lip often mantles over the depths of sadness, and the serious look may be the sober veil that covers a divine peace and joy.Collection: Sad
I know a good many people, I think, who are bigots, and who know they are bigots, and are sorry for it, but they dare not be anything else.Collection: Sorry