Richard Whately Quotes - Page 2

Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.

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

Habits are formed, not at one stroke, but gradually and insensibly; so that, unless vigilant care be employed, a great change may come over the character without our being conscious of any.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

It is a remarkable circumstance in reference to cunning persons that they are often deficient not only in comprehensive, far-sighted wisdom, but even in prudent, cautious circumspection.

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.

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

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.

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

Misgive that you may not mistake.