Edwin Hubbel Chapin Quotes

Death is a release from the impressions of the senses, and from desires that make us their puppets, and from the vagaries of the mind, and from the hard service of the flesh.

Men die in despair, while spirits die in ecstasy.

Ah! soul of mine! Ah! soul of mine! Thy sluggish senses are but bars That stand between thee and the stars, And shut thee from the world divine.

One can no more keep the mind from returning to an idea than the sea from returning to a shore. For a sailor, this is called the tide; in the case of the guilty it is called remorse. God stirs up the soul as well as the ocean.

I'll not always be here on guard. The stars twinkle in the Milky Way and the wind sighs for songs across the empty fields of a planet a Galaxy away. You won't always be here. But before you go, whisper this to your sons and their sons - "The work was free. Keep it so.

But that's the beauty of life: time is yours to keep and to change. Just a few minutes can be sufficient to carve a new road, a new track. Just a few minutes, and the void is kept at bay. You will live forever with that new road inside of you, stretching away to a place suggested, barely, on the horizon. For the shortest time, shorter than the shortest second's breath, you get to stand up to infinity. But eventually, and always, infinity wins.

And one day we will die and our ashes will fly from the aeroplane over the sea. But for now we are young; let us lay in the sun and count every beautiful thing we can see.

That knowledge humbles me, melts my bones, closes my ears, and makes my teeth rock loosely in their gums. And it also liberates me. I am a big bird winging over high mountains, down into serene valleys. I am ripples of waves on silver seas. I'm a spring leaf trembling in anticipation.

A prayer for the wild at heart kept in cages.

My body seems a mere encumbrance to me; an imbecillic wagon, hitched to the horse of desire, which is the soul.

If there were no way into God, I would not have lain in the grave of this body so long.

If the spiritual universe and the way to it were shown, No one would remain in this world for a single moment.

Life is the jailer, death the angel sent to draw the unwilling bolts and set us free.

Then the dust will return to the earth as it was, and the spirit will return to God who gave it.

Nothing is more creative than death, since it has the whole secret of life. It means that the past must be abandoned, that the unknown cannot be avoided, that 'I' cannot continue, and that nothing can be ultimately fixed. When a man knows this, he lives for the first time in his life. By holding his breath, he loses it. By letting go he finds it.

Beauty crowds me till I die.

I sang in my chains like the sea

You are the mountain, you are the rock You are the cord and you’re the spark You are the eagle, you are the lark You are the world and you’re remarkable You’re the ocean eating the shore You are the calm inside the storm You’re every emotion, you can endure You are the world and the world is yours. ((The World as I See It))

Adventure, with all its requisite danger and wildness, is a deeply spiritual longing written into the soul of man.

When we have become free, we need not go mad and throw up society and rush off to die in the forest or the cave; we shall remain where we were but we shall understand the whole thing. The same phenomena will remain but with a new meaning.

For the Persian poet Rumi, each human life is analogous to a bowl floating on the surface of an infinite ocean. As it moves along, it is slowly filling with the water around it. That's a metaphor for the acquisition of knowledge. When the water in the bowl finally reaches the same level as the water outside, there is no longer any need for the container, and it drops away as the inner water merges with the outside water. We call this the moment of death. That analogy returns to me over and over as a metaphor for ourselves.

Thus die I, thus, thus, thus. Now am I dead, Now am I fled; My soul is in the sky: Tongue, lose thy light; Moon take thy flight. Now die, die, die, die, die.

The near touch of death may be a release into life; if only it will break the egoistic will, and release that other flow.