Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

In the strife of parties and principles, backbone without brains will carry it against brains without backbone. A politician weakly and amiably in the right is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.

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

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.

Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain.

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

The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no absurdities or bigotries too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. The path of all great statesmen lies between two opposing insanities.

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.

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.

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments.

The universal line of distinction between the strong and the weak is, that one persists; the other hesitates, falters, trifles, and at last collapses or "caves in."

A clear objective perception of facts, and the laws and principles which inhere in facts, is a moral, no less than a mental quality. It implies a purification of the character from egotism and pride of opinion, a rare union of humility of feeling with audacity of thought, and, above all, the triumph of a sincere love of objective truth over the desire to exalt a subjective self.

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

Nothing lives in literature but that which has the vitality of creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old.

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

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.