Edwin Percy Whipple Quotes
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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.
[Nature]
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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.
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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.
[Literature]
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Nothing, says Goethe, is so terrible as activity without insight. - Look before you leap is a maxim for the world.
[Action]
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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.
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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.
[Press]
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The saddest failures in life are those that come from not putting forth the power and will to succeed.
[Will]
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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.
[Politics]
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The wise men of old have sent most of their morality down the stream of time in the light skiff of apothegm or epigram.
[Quotations]
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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.
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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.
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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.
[Wealth]
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