Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

52 Sourced Quotes

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
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.

Edwin Percy Whipple
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment; insinuating the most galling satire under the phraseology of panegyric.

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

Edwin Percy Whipple
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.

Edwin Percy Whipple
Humor implies a sure conception of the beautiful, the majestic and he true, by whose light it surveys and shape s their opposites. It is a humane influence, softening with mirth the ragged inequities of existence, prompting tolerant views of life, bridging over the space which separates the lofty from the lowly, the great from the humble.

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

Edwin Percy Whipple
Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Edwin Percy Whipple
From the hour of the invention of printing, books, and not kings, were to rule the world. Weapons forged in the mind, keen-edged, and brighter than a sunbeam, were to supplant the sword and battle-axe. Books! lighthouses built on the sea of time! Books! by whose sorcery the whole pageantry of the world's history moves in solemn procession before our eyes. From their pages great souls look down in all their grandeur, undimmed by the faults and follies of earthly existence, consecrated by time.

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 to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.

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 too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions.

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

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 its withering conceptions at the memory of its youthful fire, when it makes experience serve aspiration, and knowledge illumine the difficult paths through which thoughts thread their way into facts,--it is only then that age becomes broadly and nobly wise.

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

Edwin Percy Whipple
Nature and society are so replete with startling contrasts that wit often consists in the mere statement and comparison of facts, as when Hume says that the ancient Muscovites wedded their wives with a whip instead of a ring.

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 the man with his object, which lifts him altogether above the fear of danger and death, which gives to his enterprise a character of insanity to the common eye, and which communicates an almost superhuman audacity to his will.

Edwin Percy Whipple
From Lucifer to Jerry Sneak there is not an aspect of evil, imperfection, and littleness which can elude the lights of humor or the lightning of wit.

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

Edwin Percy Whipple
Sydney Smith playfully says that common sense was invented by Socrates, that philosopher having been one of its most conspicuous exemplars in conducting the contest of practical sagacity against stupid prejudice and illusory beliefs.

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

Edwin Percy Whipple