Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

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.

Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.

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

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

In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the state, pretension is nothing and power is everything.

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.

Talent is full of thoughts; Genius, of thought: one has definite acquisitions; the other, indefinite power.

The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour, in a most especial sense, the brain and not the arm, the thinker and not the soldier, books and not kings, were to rule the world; and weapons, forged in the mind, keen-edged and brighter than the sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and the battle-axe. […] 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. Could we have Plato, and Shakespeare, and Milton, in our dwellings, in the full vigor of their imaginations, in the full freshness of their hearts, few scholars would be affluent enough to afford them physical support; but the living images of their minds are within the eyes of all. From their pages their mighty souls look out upon us in all their grandeur and beauty, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time.

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.

Grit is in 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.

Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain.

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

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."

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.