Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.

Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.

A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.

Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.

Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness--Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.

We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.

The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.

Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.

From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.

Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.

Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.

Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.

The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.

Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.

There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.

Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.

A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.

In activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.

A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.

A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.

The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church.

The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in.

The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.

The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.

No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor.

Knowledge, like religion, must be experienced in order to be known.

Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.

A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.