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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.

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
Right
Expedient
Great
Expediency
Good
Sacrifice
Never
Since
Would
Less
True
Ever
Nothing

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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.
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He only is exempt from failures who makes no efforts.
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The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
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Men are like sheep, of which a flock is more easily driven than a single one.
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A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
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Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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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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If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.
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The more secure we feel against our liability to any error to which, in fact, we are liable, the greater must be our danger of falling into it.
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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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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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Happiness is no laughing matter.
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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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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 frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
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Ethical maxims are bandied about as a sort of current coin of discourse, and, being never melted down for use, those that are of base metal are never detected.
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Women never reason, or, if they do, they either draw correct inferences from wrong premises, or wrong inferences from correct premises and they always poke the fire from the top.
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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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As the telescope is not a substitute for, but an aid to, our sight, so revelation is not designed to supersede the use of reason, but to supply its deficiencies.
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