English Writer
110+ Richard Whately Quotes On Education, Religion And Friendship
Updated: by Quotlr.com Team
Richard Whately was an English writer, logician, Anglican theologian, and economist. He was an influential member of the Church of England, serving as Archbishop of Dublin from 1831 to 1863. He was a prominent advocate of utilitarianism and wrote extensively on political economy, logic, and education. Following is our collection on famous quotes by Richard Whately on education, religion, friendship.
- Died
- October 8, 1863
- Known as
- English Writer
Top 10 Richard Whately Quotes
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1.
To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.
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2.
Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.
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3.
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.
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4.
It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
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5.
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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6.
To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.
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7.
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry always gets the best of the argument.
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8.
A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
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9.
All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
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10.
Unless people can be kept in the dark, it is best for those who love the truth to give them the full light.
Richard Whately Short Quotes
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Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
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Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
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Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong.
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Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
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The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
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Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.
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He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.
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He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.
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Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.
Richard Whately Quotes About Truth
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Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
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Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves.
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As one may bring himself to believe almost anything he is inclined to believe, it makes all the difference whether we begin or end with the inquiry, What is truth?
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All men wish to have truth on their side; but few to be on the side of truth.
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There is a soul of truth in error; there is a soul of good in evil.
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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
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Christianity, contrasted with the Jewish system of emblems, is truth in the sense of reality, as substance is opposed to shadows, and, contrasted with heathen mythology, is truth as opposed to falsehood.
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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.
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It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.
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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.
Richard Whately Quotes About Children
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Sophistry, like poison, is at once detected and nauseated, when presented to us in a concentrated form; but a fallacy which, when stated barely in a few sentences, would not deceive a child, may deceive half the world, if diluted in a quarto volume.
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A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them a fortune.
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A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.
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As hardly anything can accidentally touch the soft clay without stamping its mark on it, so hardly any reading can interest a child, without contributing in some degree, though the book itself be afterwards totally forgotten, to form the character.
Richard Whately Quotes About Giving
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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.
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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.
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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 Famous Quotes And Sayings
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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.
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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.
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In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed, we see most dimly the objects which are close around us.
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To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted; as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions.
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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.
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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.
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Weak arguments are often thrust before my path; but although they are most insubstantial, it is not easy to destroy them. There is not a more difficult feat known than to cut through a cushion with a sword.
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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.
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If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.
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The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want.
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Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on.
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As there are dim-sighted people who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head nor a very elevated tone of morality, are perpetually haunted by suspicions of everybody and everything.
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Superstition is not, as has been defined, an excess of religious feeling, but a misdirection of it, an exhausting of it on vanities of man's devising.
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The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
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The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.
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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.
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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.
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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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We may print, but not stereotype, our opinions.
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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.
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Good manners are a part of good morals.
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Better too much form than too little.
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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.
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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.
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Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
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It is folly to shiver over last year's snow.
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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.
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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.
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It is worth noticing that those who assume an imposing demeanor and seek to pass themselves off for something beyond what they are, are not unfrequently as much underrated by some as overrated by others.
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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.
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Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.
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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.
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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.
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The depreciation of Christianity by indifference is a more insidious and less curable evil than infidelity itself.
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It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor,--a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness.
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All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.
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Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.
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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.
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Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.
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Falsehood, like poison, will generally be rejected when administered alone; but when blended with wholesome ingredients may be swallowed unperceived.
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As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
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A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.
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Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.
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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.
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Eloquence is relative. One can no more pronounce on the eloquence of any composition than the wholesomeness of a medicine, without knowing for whom it is intended.
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knowledge of our duties is the most useful part of philosophy.
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Misgive that you may not mistake.
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When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
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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.
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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.
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Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
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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.
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He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
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Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.
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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.
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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.
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Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.
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The love of admiration leads to fraud, much more than the love of commendation; but, on the other hand, the latter is much more likely to spoil our: good actions by the substitution of an inferior motive.
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No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language; because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.
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Concerning the utility of Rhetoric, it is to be observed that it divides itself into two; first, whether Oratorical skill be, on the whole, a public benefit, or evil; and secondly, whether any artificial system of Rules is conducive to the attainment of that skill.
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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.
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To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.
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It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
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One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business.
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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.
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When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.
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The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
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A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change.
Life Lessons by Richard Whately
- Richard Whately's work emphasizes the importance of developing a strong moral character and the need to think critically and independently.
- He stresses the importance of being able to think for oneself and to take responsibility for one's own actions.
- He also encourages us to be open to new ideas and to strive to be the best version of ourselves.