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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

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

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The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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He that is not open to conviction is not qualified for discussion.
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When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.
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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.
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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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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.
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He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.
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If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.
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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.
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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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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 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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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.
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When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.
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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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As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
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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.
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The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
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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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