Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain.

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

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.

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

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 money gets into our pockets, it somehow or other breaks out in ornaments on our persons, without always giving refinement to our manners.

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.

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

A large proportion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be. They create what is called an ideal character, in an ideal form, whose perfections compensate in some degree for the imperfections of their own.

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.

Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic, and the true, by whose light it surveys and shapes their opposites. It is an humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequalities of existence, promoting tolerant views of life, bridging over the spaces which separate the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.

Felicity, not fluency, of language is a merit.

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