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.
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.
A man of letters is often a man with two natures,--one a book nature, the other a human nature. These often clash sadly.
A politician weakly and amiably in the right, is no match for a politician tenaciously and pugnaciously in the wrong.
Humor, warm and all-embracing as the sunshine, bathes its objects in a genial and abiding light.
Genius may be almost defined as the faculty of acquiring poverty.
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; imagines, but it is not imagination; it feels deeply and fiercely, but it is not passion. It is neither, because it is all.
A true teacher should penetrate to whatever is vital in his pupil, and develop that by the light and heat of his own intelligence.
God is glorified, not by our groans, but by our thanksgivings.
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.