Richard Whately Quotes

English rhetorician, logician, economist, and theologian who also served as the Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin.

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. It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do. Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one. 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. 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. When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages. The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind... 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. A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change. 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. 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. It is generally true that all that is required to make men unmindful of what they owe to God for any blessing, is, that they should receive that blessing often and regularly. Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth; but either should set us upon testing ourselves. 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.. 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. 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. Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man. Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest. If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed. The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want. 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. There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true. 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. 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. The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity. 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. 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. 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. 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. Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.

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