Richard Whately
Richard Whately
Richard Whatelywas an English rhetorician, logician, economist, academic and theologian who also served as a reforming Church of Ireland Archbishop of Dublin. He was a leading Broad Churchman, a prolific and combative author over a wide range of topics, a flamboyant character, and one of the first reviewers to recognise the talents of Jane Austen...
NationalityEnglish
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth1 February 1787
Richard Whately quotes about
children book reading
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.
argument conviction discussion
He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
anger grieving done
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.
rewards pleasure should
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.
moving eye men
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.
fire reason inference
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.
regret years snow
It is folly to shiver over last year's snow.
twilight people tone
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.
want relief increase
The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want.
religious men vanity
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.
style firsts rhetoric
The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
men long leaving
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.
long trials overcoming
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.
wish would-be pleasure
If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.