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Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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Edwin Percy Whipple
Age: 67 †
Born: 1819
Born: March 8
Died: 1886
Died: June 16
Author
Essayist
Journalist
Literary Critic
Writer
Gloucester
Massachusetts
Acquiring
Faculty
Defined
Poverty
Genius
Almost
May
More quotes by Edwin Percy Whipple
A large portion 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.
Edwin Percy Whipple
The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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
Even in social life, it is persistency which attracts confidence, more than talents and accomplishments.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.
Edwin Percy Whipple
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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
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
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.
Edwin Percy Whipple
Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.
Edwin Percy Whipple
A thought embodied and embrained in fit words walks the earth a living being.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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
In most old communities there is a common sense even in sensuality. Vice itself gets gradually digested into a system, is amenable to certain laws of conventional propriety and honor, has for its object simply the gratification of its appetites, and frowns with quite a conservative air on all new inventions, all untried experiments in iniquity.
Edwin Percy Whipple
We like the fine extravagance of that philosopher who declared that no man was as rich as all men ought to be.
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
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
Cervantes shrewdly advises to lay a bridge of silver for a flying enemy.
Edwin Percy Whipple
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
