Richard Whately Quotes
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 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.
There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.
Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience--more desirous of security than of safety.
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.
Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.
Eloquence is relative. One can no more pronounce on the eloquence of any composition than the wholesomeness of a medicine, without knowing for whom it is intended.
Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.
The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.
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.
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.
Some persons follow the dictates of their conscience only in the same sense in which a coachman may be said to follow the horses he is driving.
Anger requires that the offender should not only be made to grieve in his turn, but to grieve for that particular wrong which has been done by him.
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.
One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business.
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.
When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
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.
Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
The more secure we feel against our liability to any error to which, in fact, we are liable, the greater must be our danger of falling into it.
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good but for neglecting his neighbor's.
Never argue at the dinner table for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
