Richard Whately Quotes

91 Sourced Quotes

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.

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

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately
Mathematical reasoning is like a long flight of steps; moral, like a short clamber up a craggy rock.

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately
Observation digs the materials; reasoning erects the building.

Richard Whately
No matter of fact can be mathematically demonstrated, though it may be proved in such a manner as to leave no doubt on the mind.

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately
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.

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

Richard Whately
Chance is a name given, for convenience, to a modification of our own ignorance.

Richard Whately
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.

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

Richard Whately
Man, considered not merely as an organized being, but as a rational agent and a member of society, is perhaps the most wonderfully contrived, and to us the most interesting specimen of Divine wisdom that we have any knowledge of.

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

Richard Whately
The field of science may be compared to an American forest, in which the more trees a man cuts down, the greater is the expanse of wood he sees around him.

Richard Whately
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.

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

Richard Whately
In the present day, however, the province of Rhetoric, in the widest acceptation that would reckoned admissible, comprehends all "Composition in Prose;" in the narrowest sense, it would be limited to "Persuasive Speaking."

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately
It is quite possible, and not uncommon, to read most laboriously, even so as to get by heart the words of a book, without really studying it at all,--that is, without employing the thoughts on the subject.

Richard Whately
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.

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

Richard Whately
Fancy, when once brought into religion, knows not where to stop. It is like one of those fiends in old stories which any one could raise, but which, when raised, could never be kept within the magic circle.

Richard Whately
Most naturalists arrange the volumes of the great book of nature, and then forget to peruse them.

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

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

Richard Whately
Cicero is hardly to be reckoned … for he delighted so much more in the practice, than in the theory, of his art, that he is perpetualy drawn off from the rigid philosophical analysis of its principles, into discursive declamations, always eloquent indeed, and often highly interesting, but adverse to regularity of system, and frequently as unsatisfactory to the practical student as to the Philosopher.

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately
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.

Richard Whately