Quote

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

Change background

T
T
T

Change font

TAGS & TOPICS

Richard Whately
Age: 76 †
Born: 1787
Born: February 1
Died: 1863
Died: October 8
Economist
Philosopher
Priest
Theologian
London
England
Instinct
Blind
Mode
Independent
Agent
Action
Tendency
Ends
Consideration
Part
Tendencies
Agents
Leads

More quotes by Richard Whately

Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
All gaming, since it implies a desire to profit at the expense of another, involves a breach of the tenth commandment.
Richard Whately
Image
It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
Richard Whately
Image
The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.
Richard Whately
Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
Proverbs accordingly are somewhat analogous to those medical Formulas which, being in frequent use, are kept ready-made-up in the chemists’ shops, and which often save the framing of a distinct Prescription.
Richard Whately
Image
Falsehood is difficult to be maintained. When the materials of a building are solid blocks of stone, very rude architecture will suffice but a structure of rotten materials needs the most careful adjustment to make it stand at all.
Richard Whately
Image
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.
Richard Whately
Image
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
Image
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
Image
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
Image
It is worth noticing that those who assume an imposing demeanor and seek to pass themselves off for something beyond what they are, are not unfrequently as much underrated by some as overrated by others.
Richard Whately
Image
Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
Richard Whately
Image
A fanatic, either, religious or political, is the subject of strong delusions.
Richard Whately
Image
Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.
Richard Whately