Edwin Percy Whipple

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— 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

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Tears are copiously showered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight in circulating; and thus, all granite on one side of…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, and the imagination are gifted to see; and sight must be reinforced by…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no bigotries or absurdities…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The great characteristic of men of active genius is a sublime self-confidence, springing not from self-conceit, but from an intense identification of…

— 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,…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Books -lighthouses erected in the great sea of time -books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius -books, by…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The very large, very respectable, and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers,--persons who are so sure…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable…

— 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…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

True wisdom, indeed, springs from the wide brain which is fed from the deep heart; and it is only when age warms…

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple