Top 100 Richard Whately Quotes (2025 Update)
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51. “To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

53. “It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.”

— Richard Whately

54. “Man is naturally more desirous of a quiet and approving, than of a vigilant and tender conscience – more desirous of security than of safety.”

— Richard Whately

55. “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.”

— Richard Whately

56. “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.”

— Richard Whately

57. “All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.”

— Richard Whately

58. “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.”

— Richard Whately

59. “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.”

— Richard Whately

60. “It is an awful, an appalling thought, that we may be, this moment and every moment, in the presence of malignant spirits.”

— Richard Whately

61. “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.”

— Richard Whately

62. “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.”

— Richard Whately

63. “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.”

— Richard Whately

64. “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.”

— Richard Whately

65. “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.”

— Richard Whately

66. “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

67. “He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.”

— Richard Whately

68. “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

69. “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.”

— Richard Whately

70. “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.”

— Richard Whately

71. “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.”

— Richard Whately

72. “Some men’s reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.”

— Richard Whately

73. “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.”

— Richard Whately

74. “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.”

— Richard Whately

75. “Falsehood, like the dry-rot, flourishes the more in proportion as air and light are excluded.”

— Richard Whately

76. “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.”

— Richard Whately

77. “In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed, we see most dimly the objects which are close around us.”

— Richard Whately

78. “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.”

— Richard Whately

79. “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.”

— Richard Whately

80. “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.”

— Richard Whately

81. “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.”

— Richard Whately

82. “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.”

— Richard Whately

83. “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.”

— Richard Whately

84. “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.”

— Richard Whately

85. “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.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

87. “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

88. “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.”

— Richard Whately

89. “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.”

— Richard Whately

90. “Those who relish the study of character may profit by the reading of good works of fiction, the product of well-established authors.”

— Richard Whately

91. “We may print, but not stereotype, our opinions.”

— Richard Whately

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

— Richard Whately

93. “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.”

— Richard Whately

94. “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.”

— Richard Whately

95. “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.”

— Richard Whately

96. “Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.”

— Richard Whately

97. “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.”

— Richard Whately

98. “Falsehood, like poison, will generally be rejected when administered alone; but when blended with wholesome ingredients may be swallowed unperceived.”

— Richard Whately

99. “The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.”

— Richard Whately

100. “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.”

— Richard Whately