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Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes

1819–1886 United States

Edwin Percy Whipple (March 8, 1819 – June 16, 1886) was an American literary critic and essayist from Massachusetts.

United States
Essayists
Journalists

Random Edwin Percy Whipple quote

102 quotes

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

Essays and Reviews (1848)

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

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

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

Character and Characteristic Men (1866)

Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

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

Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced" in order to be known.

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

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

Essays and Reviews (1848)

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

Essays and Reviews (1848)

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

Essays and Reviews (1848)

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

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

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

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

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.

Felicity, not fluency, of language is a merit.

Essays and Reviews (1848)

Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain.

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

Character and Characteristic Men (1866)

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.

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

Essays and Reviews (1848)

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.

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

Attribution

Quotes and notes from Wikiquote: Edwin Percy Whipple (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0.