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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.

Richard Whately

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Richard Whately
Age: 76 †
Born: 1787
Born: February 1
Died: 1863
Died: October 8
Economist
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
London
England
Human
Dimly
Humans
Reversed
Transactions
Judgment
Close
Objects
Law
Around
Optics

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Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.
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The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
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Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth but either should set us upon testing ourselves.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
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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.
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Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
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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.
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The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
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The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
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All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
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Happiness is no laughing matter.
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