Top 61 Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes
#1. Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#4. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#5. A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#6. There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#7. God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#8. The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#11. The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#12. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#13. As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#16. We all originally came from the woods! it is hard to eradicate from any of us the old taste for the tattoo and the war-paint; and the moment that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#17. Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#18. A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#19. The essence of the ludicrous consists in surprise,
in unexpected terms of feeling and explosions of thought,
often bringing dissimilar things together with a shock; as when some wit called Boyle, the celebrated philosopher, the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#20. The greatness of action includes immoral as well as moral greatness
Cortes and Napoleon, as well as Luther and Washington.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#21. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#22. A man of letters is often a man with two natures,
one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#23. The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#24. A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#26. Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#27. What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#28. Sydney Smith playfully says that common sense was invented by Socrates, that philosopher having been one of its most conspicuous exemplars in conducting the contest of practical sagacity against stupid prejudice and illusory beliefs.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#29. Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#30. Everybody knows that fanaticism is religion caricatured; bears, indeed, about the same relation to it that a monkey bears to a man; yet, with many, contempt of fanaticism is received as a sure sign of hostility to religion.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#31. What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#32. Grit is the grain of character. It may generally be described as heroism materialized,
spirit and will thrust into heart, brain, and backbone, so as to form part of the physical substance of the man.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#33. Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#34. Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#35. The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#37. The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#38. The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by insight before souls can be discerned as well as manners, ideas as well as objects, realities and relations as well as appearances and accidental connections.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#39. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#42. Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#43. Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#44. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#45. Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#46. Nature does not capriciously scatter her secrets as golden gifts to lazy pets and luxurious darlings, but imposes tasks when she presents opportunities, and uplifts him whom she would inform. The apple that she drops at the feet of Newton is but a coy invitation to follow her to the stars.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#47. A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#49. The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#50. An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#51. We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#54. Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#55. Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#56. The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#58. 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#59. Nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts that wit often consists in the mere statement and comparison of facts, as when Hume says that the ancient Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a ring.
Edwin Percy Whipple
#60. Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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