Richard Whately Quotes

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

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

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

Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.

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

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

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

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

To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.

The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.

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

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

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

He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.

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

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

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

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

The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.

Good manners are a part of good morals.

If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.

Men first make up their minds (and the smaller the mind the sooner made up), and then seek for the reasons; and if they chance to stumble upon a good reason, of course they do not reject it. But though they are right, they are only right by chance.

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

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.