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Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
Knowledge, like religion, must be experienced in order to be known.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
A composition which dazzles at first sight by gaudy epithets, or brilliant turns or expression, or glittering trains of imagery, may fade gradually from the mind, leaving no enduring impression; but words which flow fresh and warm from a full heart, and which are instinct with the life and breath of human feeling, pass into household memories, and partake of the immortality of the affections from which they spring.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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
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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.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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 -
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 -
A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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
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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.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
In activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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 -
A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong. You cannot, by tying an opinion, to a man's tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead nor among the wounded, but among the missing.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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The minister's brain is often the "poor-box" of the church.
Edwin Percy Whipple -
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 -
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 -
Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.
Edwin Percy Whipple