Feb 1, 1787 - Oct 8, 1863
English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.
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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.
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.
To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.
Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong.
Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
Party spirit enlists a man's virtues in the cause of his vices.
A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.
Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.
To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.
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?'
A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.
A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.
Unless people can be kept in the dark, it is best for those who love the truth to give them the full light.
He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.
Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.
Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
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.
Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.
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.
Feast of Luke the Evangelist Beginning a short series about the early church: Now if all these things should come to pass, the determined expectation of which caused the Jews to reject Christ -- if he should actually appear, with miraculous splendor, as the restorer of the Jewish nation, and city, and Temple, reigning over the whole world as a great earthly sovereign, and reserving peculiar privileges for his own nation -- if, I say, all these expectations should be fulfilled, to which the Jews have so long and so
Feast of Patrick, Bishop of Armagh, Missionary, Patron of Ireland, c.460 It is generally true that all that is required to make men unmindful of what they owe God for any blessing is that they should receive that blessing often and regularly.
Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
A man is called selfish, not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting the neighbor's.