Top 60 Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “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.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

2. “Pretension is nothing; power is everything.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

4. “Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

5. “Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

6. “Grit is 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.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

7. “God, in His wrath, has not left this world to the mercy of the subtlest dialectician; and all arguments are happily transitory in their effect when they contradict the primal intuitions of conscience and the inborn sentiments of the heart.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

10. “The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram; and the proverbs of nations, which embody the commonsense of nations, have the brisk concussion of the most sparkling wit.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

12. “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

13. “In activity we must find our joy as well as glory; and labor, like everything else that is good, is its own reward.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

15. “Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

17. “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

18. “What does competency in the long run mean? It means to all reasonable beings, cleanliness of person, decency of dress, courtesy of manners, opportunities for education, the delights of leisure, and the bliss of giving.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

19. “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

20. “Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

22. “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

23. “Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

25. “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.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

26. “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

27. “God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

28. “The inborn geniality of some people amounts to genius.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

30. “Lord Chatham and Napoleon were ns much actors as Garrick or Talma. Now, an imposing air should always be taken as evidence of imposition. Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

31. “Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

33. “Mirth is a Proteus, changing its shape and manner with the thousand diversities of individual character, from the most superfluous gayety to the deepest, moat earnest humor.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

34. “Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

36. “Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

37. “Nothing really succeeds which is not based on reality; sham, in a large sense, is never successful. In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the State, pretension is nothing and power is everything.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

38. “A writer who attempts to live on the manufacture of his imagination is continually coquetting with starvation.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

40. “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.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

41. “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.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

42. “Wit is an unexpected explosion of thought.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

43. “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 that money gets into our pockets, it somehow or another breaks out in ornaments on our person, without always giving refinement to our manners.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

44. “The minister’s brain is often the “poor-box” of the church.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

45. “As men neither fear nor respect what has been made contemptible, all honor to him who makes oppression laughable as well as detestable. Armies cannot protect it then; and walls which have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

48. “Whenever you find humour, you find pathos close by its side.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple

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

— Edwin Percy Whipple

50. “The essence of the ludicrous consists in surprise, – in unexpected terms of feeling and explosions of thought, – often bringing dissimilar things together with a shock; as when some wit called Boyle, the celebrated philosopher, the father of chemistry and brother of the Earl of Cork.”

— Edwin Percy Whipple