"A magazine or a newspaper is a shop. Each is an experiment and represents a new focus, a new ratio between commerce and intellect.""A vision of truth which does not call upon us to get out of our armchair - why, this is the desideratum of mankind.""All progress is experimental.""Benevolence alone will not make a teacher, nor will learning alone do it. The gift of teaching is a peculiar talent, and implies a need and a craving in the teacher himself.""Everybody in America is soft, and hates conflict. The cure for this, both in politics and social life, is the same - hardihood. Give them raw truth.""Good government is the outcome of private virtue.""I want to find someone on the earth so intelligent that he welcomes opinions which he condemns.""It is three and a half hours long, four characters wide and a cesspool deep.""Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We too are the victims of our own contemplation.""People get so in the habit of worry that if you save them from drowning and put them on a bank to dry in the sun with hot chocolate and muffins they wonder whether they are catching cold.""People who love soft methods and hate iniquity forget this; that reform consists in taking a bone from a dog. Philosophy will not do it.""The present in New York is so powerful that the past is lost.""The reason for the slow progress of the world seems to lie in a single fact. Every man is born under the yoke, and grows up beneath the oppressions of his age.""The world of politics is always twenty years behind the world of thought.""Too much agreement kills the chat.""Wherever you see a man who gives someone else's corruption, someone else's prejudice as a reason for not taking action himself, you see a cog in The Machine that governs us."
He was born in New York City. His father, Henry Grafton Chapman, was a broker who eventually became president of the New York Stock Exchange. He was educated at Harvard, was admitted to the bar in 1888, and practiced law until 1898. Meanwhile he had attracted attention as an essayist of unusual merit. His work is marked by originality and felicity of expression, and in the opinion of many critics has placed him in the front rank of the American essayists of his day.
He is the subject of an interesting biographical and critical essay by Edmund Wilson in The Triple Thinkers which recounts the reasons behind Chapman's deliberately burning off his own left hand.
