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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.

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
Conscience
Follow
Sense
May
Persons
Dictates
Horses
Driving
Horse

More quotes by Richard Whately

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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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It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
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Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.
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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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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
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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.
Richard Whately
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An instinct is a blind tendency to some mode of action, independent of any consideration, on the part of the agent, of the end to which the action leads.
Richard Whately
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It is also important to guard against mistaking for good-nature what is properly good-humor,--a cheerful flow of spirits and easy temper not readily annoyed, which is compatible with great selfishness.
Richard Whately
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He who is not aware of his ignorance will be only misled by his knowledge.
Richard Whately
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Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
Richard Whately
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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.
Richard Whately
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It is generally true that all that is required to make men unmindful of what they owe to God for any blessing, is, that they should receive that blessing often and regularly.
Richard Whately
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If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.
Richard Whately
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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 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
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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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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
Richard Whately
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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
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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.
Richard Whately
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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