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Richard Whately Quotes
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A fool can ask more questions than a wise man can answer; but a wise man cannot ask more questions than he will find a fool ready to answer.
Richard Whately
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It may be said, almost without qualification, that true wisdom consists in the ready and accurate perception of analogies. Without the former quality, knowledge of the past is unobstructive: without the latter it is deceptive.
Richard Whately
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Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.
Richard Whately
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That is suitable to a man, in point of ornamental expense, not which he can afford to have, but which he can afford to lose.
Richard Whately
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To learn a thing because it is easy is like buying a bargain.
Richard Whately
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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
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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
Richard Whately
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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
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Mathematical reasoning is like a long flight of steps; moral, like a short clamber up a craggy rock.
Richard Whately
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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
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Observation digs the materials; reasoning erects the building.
Richard Whately
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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
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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
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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
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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
Richard Whately
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Chance is a name given, for convenience, to a modification of our own ignorance.
Richard Whately
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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
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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
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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
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All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
Richard Whately
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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
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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
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Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
Richard Whately
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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
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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
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Quote of the day
Autumn burned brightly, a running flame through the mountains, a torch flung to the trees.
Faith Baldwin
Richard Whately
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Born:
February 1, 1787
Died:
October 8, 1863
(aged 76)
Bio:
Richard Whately was an English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.
Known for:
Elements of logic (1826)
Easy lessons on reasoning (1845)
Paley's Moral Philosophy, With Annotations
Most used words:
grammar
rhetoric
bible
system
men
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