Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Whately
Age: 76 †
Born: 1787
Born: February 1
Died: 1863
Died: October 8
Economist
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
London
England
Side
Sides
Wish
Another
Truth
Thing
Sincerely

More quotes by Richard Whately

Image
The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
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
Image
There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Neither human applause nor human censure is to be taken as the best of truth but either should set us upon testing ourselves.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
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
Image
Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.
Richard Whately
Image
The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
Richard Whately
Image
Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
Richard Whately