Edwin Percy Whipple

"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?"

"In the life of the individual, as in the more comprehensive life of the state, pretension is nothing and power is everything."

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

"The bitterest satires and noblest eulogies on married life have come from poets."

"A man of letters is often a man with two natures,—one a book nature, the other a human nature, often clash sadly."

"Seneca, with two millions out at usury, can afford to chant the praises of poverty; but for our part, we prefer the fine extravagance of that philosopher, who declared "that no man was as rich as all men ought to be."