Richard Whately Quotes - Page 4

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

The heathen mythology not only was not true, but was not even supported as true; it not only deserved no faith, but it demanded none. The very pretension to truth, the very demand of faith, were characteristic distinctions of Christianity.

Reason can no more influence the will, and operate as a motive, than the eyes which show a man his road can enable him to move from place to place, or that a ship provided with a compass can sail without a wind.

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.

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

It is a good plan, with a young person of a character to be much affected by ludicrous and absurd representations, to show him plainly by examples that there is nothing which may not be thus represented. He will hardly need to be told that everything is not a mere joke.

The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.

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.

The depreciation of Christianity by indifference is a more insidious and less curable evil than infidelity itself.

Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.

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

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.

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.

It is an awful, an appalling thought, that we may be, this moment and every moment, in the presence of malignant spirits.

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

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

Happiness is no laughing matter.

The attendant on William Rufus, who discharged at a deer an arrow, which glanced against a tree and killed the king, was no murderer, because he had no such design. And, on the other hand, a man who should lie in wait to assassinate another, and pull the trigger of a gun with that intent, would be morally a murderer, not the less though the gun should chance to miss fire.

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.

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.

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.

Trust, therefore, for the overcoming of a difficulty, not to long-continued study after you have once become bewildered, but to repeated trials at intervals.

The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want.