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No one complains of the rules of Grammar as fettering Language because it is understood that correct use is not founded on Grammar, but Grammar on correct use. A just system of Logic or of Rhetoric is analogous, in this respect, to Grammar.

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
Logic
Rules
Complains
Understood
Analogous
Respect
Grammar
System
Founded
Language
Rhetoric
Use
Correct
Complaining

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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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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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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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Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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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.
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Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
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Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
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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.
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Woman is like the reed which bends to every breeze, but breaks not in the tempest.
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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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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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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.
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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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Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.
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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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Nothing but the right can ever be expedient, since that can never be true expediency which would sacrifice a great good to a less.
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Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.
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The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
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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.
Richard Whately