Inspirational Quotations

Inspirational Quotes by Edwin Percy Whipple (American Literary Critic)

Edwin Percy Whipple (1819–86) was an American essayist, literary critic, and lyceum lecturer. He was one of the first writers to devote his entire literary career to writing criticism.

Born in Gloucester, Massachusetts, Whipple made his interest in literature and history a lifelong passion. He wrote for newspapers from age fourteen while working in finance. His first book was Essays and Reviews (2 vols., 1849.)

In 1860, Whipple resigned his position at Boston’s Merchants’ Exchange to dedicate his time to writing and lecturing. He produced Character and Characteristic Men (1866) and Success and its Conditions (1871.)

Whipple is noteworthy for his appraisals of early American writers in American Literature and Other Papers (1887) and Recollections of Eminent Men (1887.) He was ranked with Edgar Allan Poe and James Russell Lowell as an authoritative literary critic of his time.

Whipple’s perceptive evaluations of foreign literature are included in Essays and Reviews (2 vols., 1848–49,) Lectures on Subjects Connected with Literature and Life (1850,) and Literature of the Age of Elizabeth (1869.)

Whipple served as a trustee of the Boston Public Library, 1868–70. Whipple’s addresses, lectures, and articles were also published in The North American Review and other prominent periodicals. A biography, Charles Dickens, The Man and His Work (2 vols., 1912,) appeared posthumously.

More: Wikipedia READ: Works by Edwin Percy Whipple

Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Language, Happiness

Any style formed in imitation of some model must be affected and straight-laced.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Style

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
Topics: Action

The invention of printing added a new element of power to the race. From that hour 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-ax.
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
Topics: Humor

Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence more than talents and accomplishments.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Perseverance

Every great originating mind produces in some way a change in society; every great originating mind, whose exercise is controlled by duty, effects a beneficial change. This effect may be immediate, may be remote. A nation may be in a tumult today for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Thought

Books are the carriers of civilization. Without books, history is silent, literature dumb, science crippled, thought and speculation at a standstill. They are engines of change, windows on the world, lighthouses erected in the sea of time.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: History, Reading, Book, Books

The eye observes only what the mind, the heart, 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

All history shows the power of blood over circumstances, as agriculture shows the power of the seeds over the soil.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Ancestry

Nothing lives in literature but that which has in it the vitality of creative art; and it would be safe advice to the young to read nothing but what is old.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Literature

Nothing, says Goethe, is so terrible as activity without insight. “Look before you leap” is a maxim for the world.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Action

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

What a man does with his wealth depends upon his idea of happiness. Those who draw prizes in life are apt to spend tastelessly, if not viciously; not knowing that it requires as much talent to spend as to make.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Wealth, Money

A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.—You cannot, by tying an opinion to a man’s tongue, make him the representative of that opinion; and at the close of any battle for principles, his name will be found neither among the dead, nor the wounded, but among the missing.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Politics

A large portion of human beings live not so much in themselves as in what they desire to be.—They create an ideal character the perfections of which compensate in some degree for imperfections of their own.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Ideals

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

Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Soul

Cheerfulness, in most cheerful people, is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Discipline, Cheerfulness, Joy

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
Topics: Politics

Knowledge, like religion, must be “experienced” in order to be known.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Knowledge

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 that have remained impenetrable to cannon have fallen before a roar of laughter or a hiss of contempt.
Edwin Percy Whipple

No language can fitly express the meanness, the baseness, the brutality, with which the world has ever treated its victims of one age and boasts of them in the next. Dante is worshiped at that grave to which he was hurried by persecution. Milton, in his own day, was “Mr. Milton, the blind adder, that spit his venom on the king’s person”; and soon after, “the mighty orb of song.” These absurd transitions from hatred to apotheosis, this recognition just at the moment when it becomes a mockery, saddens all intellectual history.
Edwin Percy Whipple

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment; insinuating the most galling satire under the phraseology of panegyric; placing its victim naked on a bed of briers and thistles, thinly covered with rose-leaves; adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing and fretting, and riddling him through and through, with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles.
Edwin Percy Whipple

There is a very large and very knowing class of misanthropes who rejoice in the name of grumblers, persons who are so sure that the world is going to ruin that they resent every attempt to comfort them as an insult to their sagacity, and accordingly seek their chief consolation in being inconsolable, and their chief pleasure in being displeased.
Edwin Percy Whipple

An imposing air should always be taken as an evidence of imposition.—Dignity is often a veil between us and the real truth of things.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Manners, Dignity

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

Most of the men of dignity, who awe or bore their more genial brethren, are simply men who possess the art of passing off their insensibility for wisdom, their dullness for depth, and of concealing imbecility of intellect under haughtiness of manner.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Dignity

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

God is glorified, not by our groans but by our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Topics: Cheerfulness

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