Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes
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The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
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The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
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Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.
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A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
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The very large, very respectable, and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers,--persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin, that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, their chief pleasure in being displeased.
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Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.
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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.
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Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
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Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.
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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.
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The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
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Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.
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Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.
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The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church.
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In activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.
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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.
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Heroism is no extempore work of transient impulse--a rocket rushing fretfully up to disturb the darkness by which, after a moment's insulting radiance, it is ruthlessly swallowed up,--but a steady fire, which darts forth tongues of flame. It is no sparkling epigram of action, but a luminous epic of character.
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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.
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Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
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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.
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Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.
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Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.
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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.
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A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.