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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.

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
Pronounce
Eloquence
Intended
Composition
Relative
Medicine
Knowing
Without
Wholesomeness

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Unless people can be kept in the dark, it is best for those who love the truth to give them the full light.
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Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
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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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Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
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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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Everyone wishes to have truth on his side, but not everyone wishes to be on the side of truth.
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The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
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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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Of metaphors, those generally conduce most to energy or vivacity of style which illustrate an intellectual by a sensible object.
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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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As a science, logic institutes an analysis of the process of the mind in reasoning, and investigating the principles on which argumentation is conducted as an art, it furnishes such rules as may be derived from those principles, for guarding against erroneous deductions.
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It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
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Better too much form than too little.
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Geologists complain that when they want specimens of the common rocks of a country, they receive curious spars just so, historians give us the extraordinary events and omit just what we want,--the every-day life of each particular time and country.
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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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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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In our judgment of human transactions, the law of optics is reversed, we see most dimly the objects which are close around us.
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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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Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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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