Quotes from Edwin Percy Whipple

There is a serious and resolute egotism that makes a man interesting to his friends and formidable to his opponents.

There is a natural disposition with us to judge an author's personal character by the character of his works. We find it difficult to understand the common antithesis of a good writer and a bad man.

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

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

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

Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.

Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.

A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.

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

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

No education deserves the name unless it develops thought, unless it pierces down to the mysterious spiritual principle of mind, and starts that into activity and growth.

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

The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.

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

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

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

The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.

Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.

God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.

A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.

We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.