Top 100 Richard Whately Quotes (2025 Update)

1. “Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.”

— Richard Whately

Featured in: Efficiency Quotes, Time Management Quotes, Good Morning Quotes, Positive Morning Quotes

2. “A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.”

— Richard Whately

3. “Good manners are a part of good morals.”

— Richard Whately

4. “A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor’s.”

— Richard Whately

5. “As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.”

— Richard Whately

6. “Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.”

— Richard Whately

7. “A man will never change his mind if he have no mind to change.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

9. “The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind...”

— Richard Whately

10. “To teach one who has no curiosity to learn, is to sow a field without ploughing it.”

— Richard Whately

11. “A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them fortune.”

— Richard Whately

12. “It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.”

— Richard Whately

13. “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.”

— Richard Whately

14. “Better too much form than too little.”

— Richard Whately

15. “Happiness is no laughing matter.”

— Richard Whately

16. “Curiosity is as much the parent of attention, as attention is of memory.”

— Richard Whately

17. “When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.”

— Richard Whately

18. “Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.”

— Richard Whately

19. “Honesty is the best policy; but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.”

— Richard Whately

20. “He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.”

— Richard Whately

21. “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.”

— Richard Whately

22. “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.”

— Richard Whately

23. “Party spirit enlists a man’s virtues in the cause of his vices.”

— Richard Whately

24. “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

25. “To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

27. “Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

29. “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.”

— Richard Whately

30. “There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

32. “Persecution is not wrong because it is cruel; but it is cruel because it is wrong.”

— Richard Whately

33. “He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.”

— Richard Whately

34. “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...”

— Richard Whately

35. “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.”

— Richard Whately

36. “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.”

— Richard Whately

37. “Misgive that you may not mistake.”

— Richard Whately

38. “Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.”

— Richard Whately

39. “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?’”

— Richard Whately

40. “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.”

— Richard Whately

41. “Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.”

— Richard Whately

42. “The depreciation of Christianity by indifference is a more insidious and less curable evil than infidelity itself.”

— Richard Whately

43. “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.”

— Richard Whately

44. “The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.”

— Richard Whately

45. “It is folly to shiver over last year’s snow.”

— Richard Whately

46. “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.”

— Richard Whately

47. “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.”

— Richard Whately

48. “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.”

— Richard Whately

49. “Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.”

— Richard Whately

50. “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