Richard Whately

A certain class of novels may with propriety be called fables.

Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.

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.

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.

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.

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.

knowledge of our duties is the most useful part of philosophy.

Misgive that you may not mistake.

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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.

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

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.

He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.

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.

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.

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.

Great affectation and great absence of it are at first sight very similar.

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.

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.

It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.

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.

Happiness is no laughing matter.

The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.