Edwin Percy Whipple

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

Edwin Percy Whipple

Quotes

• But man, being, as I have said, essentially an active being, he must find in activity his joy, as well as his duty and glory. And labor, like everything else that is good, is its own exceeding great reward.
  • "Loafing and Laboring", The North American Review, Vol. CLIII, No. 416 (July 1891), p. 34.
  • Sometimes misattributed to Henry Benjamin Whipple.

Essays and Reviews (1848)

Essays and Reviews (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1848)

• The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
  • Vol. I. Macaulay, p. 21.

• Felicity, not fluency, of language is a merit.
  • Vol. I. Poets and Poetry of America, p. 60.

• A Thought embodied and embrained in fit words, walks the earth a living being.
  • Vol. I. Words, p. 114.

• Nothing is rarer than the use of a word in its exact meaning.
  • Vol. I. Words, p. 115.

• The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
  • Vol. I. Sydney Smith, p. 148.

• Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention'
  • Vol. II. Romance of Rascality, p. 74.

Literature and Life (1850)

Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life (Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1850). Enlarged edition of 1883 (with four additional lectures) titled simply Literature and Life.

• 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.
  • Lecture I: Authors in Their Relation to Life, pp. 36–38.
  • Paraphrased variant keeping only (with some changes and minor deletions) the sentences and phrases in bold from the original above:—
  • 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.
    • As reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 386.

• The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram.
  • Lecture III: Wit and Humor, p. 86.

• 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.
  • Lecture III: Wit and Humor, p. 92.

• Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.
  • Lecture III: Wit and Humor, p. 102.

• 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.
  • Lecture IV: The Ludicrous Side of Life, p. 133.

• An epigram often flashes light into regions where reason shines but dimly.
  • Lecture IV: The Ludicrous Side of Life, p. 148.

• Genius is not a single power, but a combination of great powers. It reasons, but it is not reasoning; it judges, but it is not judgment; it imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all. It is another name for the perfection of human nature, for Genius is not a fact but an ideal. It is nothing less than the possession of all the powers and impulses of humanity, in their greatest possible strength and most harmonious combination; and the genius of any particular man is great in proportion as he approaches this ideal of universal genius.
  • Lecture V: Genius, pp. 158–159.

• Talent is a cistern; Genius, a fountain.
  • Lecture V: Genius, p. 162.

• Talent jogs to conclusions to which Genius takes giant leaps.
  • Lecture V: Genius, p. 162.

• Talent is full of thoughts; Genius, of thought: one has definite acquisitions; the other, indefinite power.
  • Lecture V: Genius, p. 162.

• 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.
  • Lecture V: Genius, p. 183.

Character and Characteristic Men (1866)

Character and Characteristic Men, (Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1866)

• 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."
  • Character, p. 14.

• Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments.
  • Character, p. 14.

• The strife of politics tends to unsettle the calmest understanding, and ulcerate the most benevolent heart. There are no absurdities or bigotries too gross for parties to create or adopt under the stimulus of political passions. The path of all great statesmen lies between two opposing insanities.
  • Eccentric Character, p. 49.

• Character is the spiritual body of the person, and represents the individualization of vital experience, the conversion of unconscious things into self-conscious men.
  • Intellectual Character, p. 71.

• 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.
  • Heroic Character, pp. 100–101.

• 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.
  • Thackeray, p. 199.

• 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.
  • Agassiz, p. 268.

Success and Its Conditions (1871)

Success and Its Conditions (Boston: James R. Osgood and Company, 1871)

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

• 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.
  • Grit, p. 58.

• 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, p. 69.

• 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.
  • The Tricks of Imagination, p. 186.

• Men educate each other in reason by contact or collision, and keep each other sane by the very conflict of their separate hobbies. Society as a whole is the deadly enemy of the particular crotchet of each, and solitude is almost the only condition in which the acorn of conceit can grow to the oak of perfect self-delusion.
  • The Tricks of Imagination, pp. 187–188.

• God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
  • Cheerfulness, p. 195.

• Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
  • Cheerfulness, p. 198.

• The contemplation of beauty in nature, in art, in literature, in human character, diffuses through our being a soothing and subtle joy, by which the heart's anxious and aching cares are softly smiled away.
  • Cheerfulness, pp. 207–208.

• Knowledge, like religion, must be "experienced" in order to be known.
  • Mental and Moral Pauperism, p. 223.

• 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.
  • Shoddy, p. 290.

• Seneca, with two millions out at usury, can afford to chant the praises of poverty; but for our part, we prefer the fine extravagance of that philosopher, who declared "that no man was as rich as all men ought to be."
  • Shoddy, p. 293.

• 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.
  • Shoddy, p. 299.