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It is a remarkable circumstance in reference to cunning persons that they are often deficient not only in comprehensive, far-sighted wisdom, but even in prudent, cautious circumspection.

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
Remarkable
Deficient
Circumstances
Sighted
Wisdom
Prudent
Often
Cautious
Persons
Circumstance
Even
Reference
Comprehensive
Cunning
Circumspection

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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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Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
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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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Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
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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.
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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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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.
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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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All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
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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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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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The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
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A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.
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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 word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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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 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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Even supposing there were some spiritual advantage in celibacy, it ought to be completely voluntary.
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Every instance of a man's suffering the penalty of the law is an instance of the failure of that penalty in effecting its purpose, which is to deter.
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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.
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