Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

Books are not life, only its ashes.

History says, 'Don't hope on this side of the grave.'

Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.

All that remains is was.

History is a heavy thing everywhere.

Nothing is forever, but history is forever.

I'm passionate about history and there's no more historic place than London. We're sitting on a thousand years of history and you can smell it as you're walking around the streets.

History is a great cemetery: men, deeds, ideas are always dying as soon as they are born.

There's nothing as dear as the sight of ruins.

The need has gone; the memorial thereof remains.

When we see the many grave-stones which have fallen in, which have been defaced by the footsteps of the congregation, which lie buried under the ruins of the churches, that have themselves crumbled together over them; we may fancy the life after death to be as a second life, into which man enters in the figure, or the picture or the inscription, and lives longer there than when he was really alive. But this figure also, this second existence, dies out too, sooner or later. Time will not allow himself to be cheated of his rights with the monuments of men or with themselves.

What is the ultimate impulse to write? Because all this is going to vanish.

And when midst fallen London, they survey The stone where Alexander's ashes lay, Shall own with humbled pride the lesson must By Time's slow finger written in the dust.

How idle a boast, after all, is the immortality of a name! Time is ever silently turning over his pages; we are too much engrossed by the story of the present to think of the character and anecdotes that gave interest to the past; and each age is a volume thrown aside and forgotten.

I'm a big history buff so to walk the streets...the ancient world like that was pretty astounding.

History is the memory of time, the life of the dead and the happiness of the living.

If I close my eyes forever will it all remain unchanged?

When men die, they enter history. When statues die, they enter art. This botany of death is what we call culture.

Those who try to obliterate the past are injuring the present.

Life is sad. People, you know, are going to pass, and you know that you will one day.

A holiday is when you celebrate something that's all finished up, that happened a long time ago and now there's nothing left to celebrate but the dead.

It is sadder to find the past again and find it inadequate to the present than it is to have it elude you and remain forever a harmonious conception of memory.

For pleasures past I do not grieve, nor perils gathering near; My greatest grief is that I leave nothing that claims a tear.