Richard Whately Quotes

A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.

Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice; but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all.

Not in books only, nor yet in oral discourse, but often also in words there are boundless stores of moral and historic truth, and no less of passion and imagination laid up, from which lessons of infinite worth may be derived.

As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.

Of Rhetoric various definitions have been given by different writers; who, however, seem not so much to have disagreed in their conceptions of the nature of the same thing, as to have had different things in view while they employed the same term.

Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.

Do you want to know the man against whom you have most reason to guard yourself? Your looking-glass will give you a very fair likeness of his face.

It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor,
a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness.

Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.

In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed; we see the most indistinctly the objects which are close around us.

Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves.

Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.

Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.

All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.

Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.

Some persons resemble certain trees, such as the nut, which flowers in February and ripens its fruit in September; or the juniper and the arbutus; which take a whole year or more to perfect their fruit; and others, the cherry, which takes between two an three months.

An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.

A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change.

Preach not because you have to say something, but because you have something to say.

Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong.

Christianity, contrasted with the Jewish system of emblems, is truth in the sense of reality, as substance is opposed to shadows, and, contrasted with heathen mythology, is truth as opposed to falsehood.

Grace is in a great measure a natural gift; elegance implies cultivation; or something of more artificial character. A rustic, uneducated girl may be graceful, but an elegant woman must be accomplished and well trained. It is the same with things as with persons; we talk of a graceful tree, but of an elegant house or other building. Animals may be graceful, but they cannot be elegant. The movements of a kitten or a young fawn are full of grace; but to call them "elegant" animals would be absurd.

It is not that pearls fetch a high price because men have dived for them; but on the contrary, men have dived for them because they fetch a high price.

Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.

The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.

It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.

Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.

Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.

Women never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises; and they always poke the fire from the top.

Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.

As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.

The Eastern monarch who proclaimed a reward to him who should discover a new pleasure, would have deserved well of mankind had he stipulated that it should be blameless.

As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, 'What is truth?'

Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.

Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on.

Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.

Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience
more desirous of security than of safety.

As the telescope is not a substitute for, but an aid to, our sight, so revelation is not designed to supersede the use of reason, but to supply its deficiencies.

A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.

As an exercise of the reasoning faculties, pure mathematics is an admirable exercise, because it consists of reasoning alone and does not encumber the student with any exercise of judgment.

It is worth noticing that those who assume an imposing demeanor and seek to pass themselves off for something beyond what they are, are not unfrequently as much underrated by some as overrated by others.

It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.

To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.

Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.

To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.

It is generally true that all that is required to make men unmindful of what they owe God for any blessing is that they should receive that blessing often and regularly.

Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.

Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars; just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,
the every-day life of each particular time and country.

Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.

When any person of really eminent virtue becomes the object of envy, the clamor and abuse by which he is assailed is but the sign and accompaniment of his success in doing service to the public. And if he is a truly wise man, he will take no more notice of it than the moon does of the howling of the dogs. Her only answer to them is to shine on.

Misgive that you may not mistake.

A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.

It may be worth noticing as a curious circumstance, when persons past forty before they were at all acquainted form together a very close intimacy of friendship. For grafts of old wood to take, there must be a wonderful congeniality between the trees.

Proverbs accordingly are somewhat analogous to those medical Formulas which, being in frequent use, are kept ready-made-up in the chemists' shops, and which often save the framing of a distinct Prescription.

When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.

Better too much form than too little.

Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.

As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions.

It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is unobstructive: without the latter it is deceptive.

That is suitable to a man, in point of ornamental expense, not which he can afford to have, but which he can afford to lose.

He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.

Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.

There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.

Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.

All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.

The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.

He who is unaware of his ignorance will only be misled by his knowledge.

We may print, but not stereotype, our opinions.

Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.

It is folly to shiver over last year's snow.

It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.