“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put on their coronation robes glittering with fire; and through their tears have the sorrowful first seen the gate of heaven.”

—  Edwin Hubbell Chapin

Source: Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers, P. 567.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update June 3, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seamed with scars; martyrs have put …" by Edwin Hubbell Chapin?
Edwin Hubbell Chapin photo
Edwin Hubbell Chapin 16
American priest 1814–1880

Related quotes

Khalil Gibran photo

“Out of suffering have emerged the strongest souls; the most massive characters are seared with scars.”

Khalil Gibran (1883–1931) Lebanese artist, poet, and writer

Edwin Hubbell Chapin, as quoted in Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895) by Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert
Misattributed

Josh Duffy photo

“If I have to start fires, to put out fires, then so be it.”

Josh Duffy (1978) Subject of the documentary THE MAYOR

Film Quotes

George Eliot photo

“There is no despair so absolute as that which comes with the first moments of our first great sorrow, when we have not yet known what it is to have suffered and be healed, to have despaired and to have recovered hope.”

George Eliot book Adam Bede

Adam Bede (1859)

John Vance Cheney photo

“Not in the time of pleasure
Hope doth set her bow;
But in the sky of sorrow,
Over the vale of woe. Through gloom and shadow look we
On beyond the years!
The soul would have no rainbow
Had the eyes no tears.”

John Vance Cheney (1848–1922) American writer

The Century Vol. 44, Issue 4 (August 1892)
Tears (1892)

Harlan Ellison photo

“All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night.”

Harlan Ellison (1934–2018) American writer

Delusion for a Dragon Slayer (1966)
Context: Empty winds howled down out of the tundras of his soul. This was the charnel house of his finest fantasies. The burial ground of his forever. The garbage dump, the slain meat, the putrefying reality of his dreams and his Heaven.
Griffin stumbled away from her, hearing the shrieks of men needlessly drowned by his vanity, hearing the voiceless accusation of the devil proclaiming cowardice, hearing the orgasm-condemnation of lust that was never love, of brute desire that was never affection, and realizing at last that these were the real substances of his nature, the true faces of his sins, the marks in the ledger of a life he had never led, yet had worshipped silently at an altar of evil.
All these thoughts, as the guardian of Heaven, the keeper at the gate, the claimer of souls, the weigher of balances, advanced on him through the night.

“It's easy to forget you are in debt to the tune of £10, and to a woman who never forgets anything. Crikey, she can even tell you which Coronation Street character was the first one to have their brain removed (Footnote: And not have it replaced by acting talent unfortunately.)”

Peter Corey (1946) British writer

Coping With series, Coping with Cash (2000)

Letitia Elizabeth Landon photo

“Youth's first acquaintance with sorrow is a terrible thing—before time has taught, what it will surely teach, that grief is our natural portion, at once transitory and eternal. But the first lesson is the severest—we have not then looked among our fellows, and seen that suffering is general; and we feel as if marked out by fate for misery that has no parallel.”

Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838) English poet and novelist

Heath's book of Beauty, 1833 (1832)

Thomas Campbell photo

“And yet, fair bow, no fabling dreams,
But words of the Most High,
Have told why first thy robe of beams
Was woven in the sky.”

Thomas Campbell (1777–1844) British writer

Theodric : A Domestic Tale; and Other Poems (1825), To the Rainbow
Context: p>Can all that optics teach, unfold
Thy form to please me so,
As when I dreamt of gems and gold
Hid in thy radiant bow?When Science from Creation's face
Enchantment's veil withdraws,
What lovely visions yield their place
To cold material laws! And yet, fair bow, no fabling dreams,
But words of the Most High,
Have told why first thy robe of beams
Was woven in the sky.</p

“A coroner must be humane, fair and fearless in obtaining the truth. That is why I have put my head above the parapet.”

Montague Levine (1922–2013) British surgeon

Quoted in Daily Telegraph obituary http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/obituaries/9878394/Sir-Montague-Levine.html

James Anthony Froude photo

“The conviction of the martyr that the stake is the gate of Paradise, diminishes the dignity of the suffering in proportion to its strength. If it be absolute certainty, the trial is absolutely nothing.”

James Anthony Froude book The Nemesis of Faith

Fragments of Markham's notes
The Nemesis of Faith (1849)
Context: The conviction of the martyr that the stake is the gate of Paradise, diminishes the dignity of the suffering in proportion to its strength. If it be absolute certainty, the trial is absolutely nothing. And that all-wise Being who knew all, who himself willed, erected, determined all, what could the worst earthly suffering he to him to whom all the gates which close our knowledge were shining crystal? What trial, what difficulty was it all to him? His temptation is a mockery. His patience, meekness, humility, it is but trifling with words, unless he was a man, and but a man.
And yet what does it not say on the other side for mankind, that the life of one good man, which had nothing, nothing but its goodness to recommend it, should have struck so deep into the heart of the race that for eighteen hundred years they have seen in that life something so far above them that they will not claim a kindred origin with him who lived it. And while they have scarcely bettered in their own practice, yet stand, and ever since have stood, self-condemned, in acknowledging in spite of themselves that such goodness alone is divine.

Related topics