Edwin Hubbel Chapin Men Quotations

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.

A true man never frets about his place in the world, but just slides into it by the gravitation of his nature, and swings there as easily as a star.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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!

A man can no more be a Christian without facing evil and conquering it than he can be a soldier without going to battle, facing the cannon's mouth, and encountering the enemy in the field.

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

The productions of the press, fast as steam can make and carry them, go abroad through all the land, silent as snowflakes, but potent as thunder. It is an additional tongue of steam and lightning, by which a man speaks his first thought, his instant argument or grievance, to millions in a day.

The minister should preach as if he felt that although the congregation own the church, and have bought the pews, they have not bought him. His soul is worth no more than any other man's, but it is all he has, and he cannot be expected to sell it for a salary. The terms are by no means equal. If a parishioner does not like the preaching, he can go elsewhere and get another pew, but the preacher cannot get another soul.

Man gains wider dominion by his intellect than by his right arm. The mustard-seed of thought is a pregnant treasury of vast results. Like the germ in the Egyptian tombs its vitality never perishes; and its fruit will spring up after it has been buried for long ages.

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

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.

It is the penalty of fame that a man must ever keep rising. "Get a reputation, and then go to bed," is the absurdest of all maxims. "Keep up a reputation or go to bed, "would be nearer the truth.

Man is concentric: you have to take fold after fold off of him before you get to the centre of his personality. You must get below his animal nature, habits, customs, affections, daily life, and sometimes go away down into the heart of the man, before you know what is really in him. But when you get into the last core of these concentric rings of personality you find a sense of the infinite-a consciousness of immortality linked to something higher and better.

Neutral men are the devil's allies.

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

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.

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

For soon, very soon do men forget Their friends upon whom Death's seal is set.

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Home is the seminary of all other institutions. There are the roots of all public prosperity, the foundations of the State, the germs of the church. There is all that in the child makes the future man; all that in the man makes the good citizen.

No great truth bursts upon man without having its hemisphere of darkness and 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.

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.

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.

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.

The best answer to all objections urged against prayer is the fact that man cannot help praying; for we may be sure that that which is so spontaneous and ineradicable in human nature has its fitting objects and methods in the arrangements of a boundless Providence.

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.

Most men are less afraid of ghosts than of facts.

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!

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

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.

How often a new affection makes a new man! The sordid, cowering soul turns heroic. The frivolous girl becomes the steadfast martyr of patience and ministration, transfigured by deathless love. The career of bounding impulses turns into an anthem of sacred deeds.

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

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.

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

A small lie, if it actually is a lie, condemns a man as much as a big and black falsehood. If a man will deliberately cheat to the amount of a single cent, give him opportunity and he would cheat to any amount.

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