Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes - Page 2

Quotes about:

• No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of the next. Dante is worshipped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was "Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king's person"; and soon after, "the mighty orb of song." These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Song, Kings, Hatred

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.4

  6 Copy quote

• Books -lighthouses erected in the great sea of time -books, the precious depositories of the thoughts and creations of genius -books, by whose sorcery times past become time present, and the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes, -these were to visit the firesides of the humble and lavish the treasures of the intellect upon the poor.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Time, Moving, Book

  7 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Class, Names, Knowing

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1871). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.199

  14 Copy quote

• 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.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Men, Self, Perfect

  6 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Light, Shining, Reason

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.75

  16 Copy quote

• 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

  Wise, Men, Light

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

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Uplifting, Nature, Stars

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.78

  9 Copy quote

• There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Men, Interesting, Opponents

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Knowing, Ideas

  6 Copy quote

• Pretension is nothing; power is everything.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Power, Pretension

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Names, Missing

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Use

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1870). “Essays and Reviews”, p.115

  4 Copy quote

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

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Eulogy, Married, Poet

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.14

  7 Copy quote

• But the conceit of one's self and the conceit of one's hobby are hardly more prolific of eccentricity than the conceit of one's money. Avarice, the most hateful and wolfish of all the hard, cool, callous dispositions of selfishness, has its own peculiar caprices and crotchets. The ingenuities of its meanness defy all the calculations of reason, and reach the miraculous in subtlety.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Self, Hobbies, Peculiar

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.47

  6 Copy quote

• 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

  Tattoo, War, Giving

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.290

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Heart, Men

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.58

  10 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Spiritual, Names

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.95

  4 Copy quote

• The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  People, Genius, Cheerfulness

  8 Copy quote

• 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

  Men, Monkeys, Bears

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.68

  5 Copy quote

• 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

  Education, Teacher, Light

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1875). “Success and Its Conditions”, p.109

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Eye, Heart, Reality

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1866). “Character and Characteristic Men”, p.199

  4 Copy quote

• 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

  Character, Men, Judging

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.5

  4 Copy quote

• Tears are copiously showered over frailties the discoverer takes a malicious delight in circulating; and thus, all granite on one side of the heart, and all milk on the other, the unsexed scandal-monger hies from house to house, pouring balm from its weeping eyes on the wounds it inflicts with its stabbing tongue.

  Edwin Percy Whipple

  Heart, Eye, House

  Edwin Percy Whipple (1851). “Literature and life, lects”, p.71

  6 Copy quote

• 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

• 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

  Character, Diversity, Moats

  4 Copy quote

Page 2 of 4

First

← Prev

1

2

3

4

Next →

• facebook
• twitter
• googleplus
• email
• linkedin