Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes - Page 3

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• Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Happiness, Fluency, Merit

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Essays and Reviews”, p.60

  66 Copy quote

• Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Beautiful, Humble, Humor

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Earth, Fit, Walks

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.114

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Running, Mean, Opportunity

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.293

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Honesty, Successful, Reality

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.3

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Bridges, Flying, Enemy

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Knowledge, Order, Known

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.223

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Brain, Church, Poor

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1871). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.235

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Genius, May, Poverty

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.38

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Epic, Rushing

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Greatness, Action, Moral

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.86

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Genius, Talent, Fountain

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Heart, Wrath, Intuition

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Style, Models, Affected

  7 Copy quote

• In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Air, Law, Common Sense

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.39

  4 Copy quote

• Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Eye, Mad, Facts

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and characteristic men”, p.150

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Spiritual, Character, Men

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.71

  7 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Criticism, Purity, Contact

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.21

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Mouths, Authorship, Familiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.148

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Iron, Hatred, Scorpions

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.46

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Brother, Father, Essence

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Wife, Facts, Ancient

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.43

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Light, Evil, Imperfection

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1859). “Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life”, p.125

  7 Copy quote

• 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

  Joy, Rewards, Action

  4 Copy quote

• Lord Chatham and Napoleon were ns much actors as Garrick or Talma. Now, an imposing air should always be taken as evidence of imposition. Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Real, Taken, Air

  7 Copy quote

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