Edwin Percy Whipple (March 8, 1819 – June 16, 1886) was an American essayist and critic.
Wit implies hatred or contempt of folly and crime, produces its effects by brisk shocks of surprise, uses the whip of scorpions and the branding-iron, stabs, stings, pinches, tortures, goads, teases, corrodes, undermines.
Do we, mad as we all are after riches, hear often enough from the pulpit the spirit of those words in which Dean Swift, in his epitaph on the affluent and profligate Colonel Chartres, announces the small esteem of wealth in the eyes of God, from the fact of His thus lavishing it upon the meanest and basest of His creatures?
The very large, very respectable, 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, their chief pleasure in being displeased.
The familiar writer is apt to be his own satirist. Out of his own mouth is he judged.
Felicity, not fluency of language, is a merit.
Pretension is nothing; power is everything.
Every style formed elaborately on any model must be affected and straight-laced.
Cheerfulness in most cheerful people is the rich and satisfying result of strenuous discipline.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but our thanksgivings; and all good thought and good action claim a natural alliance with good cheer.
Of the three prerequisites of genius; the first is soul; the second is soul; and the third is soul.
Books are lighthouses erected in the great sea of time.
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.
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.
The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets.
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.
Sin, every day, takes out a patent for some new invention.
The purity of the critical ermine, like that of the judicial, is often soiled by contact with politics.
What a lesson, indeed, is all history and all life to the folly and fruitlessness of pride! The Egyptian kings had their embalmed bodies preserved in massive pyramids, to obtain an earthly immortality. In the seventeenth century they were sold as quack medicines, and now they are burnt for fuel! The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth. Mummy is become merchandise.
Talent is full of thoughts, Genius is thought. Talent is a cistern, Genius a fountain.
A nation may be in a tumult to-day for a thought which the timid Erasmus placidly penned in his study more than two centuries ago.