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

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If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.
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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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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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To know your ruling passion, examine your castles in the air.
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The word of knowledge, strictly employed, implies three things: truth, proof, and conviction.
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The best security against revolution is in constant correction of abuses and the introduction of needed improvements. It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
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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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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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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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Lose an hour in the morning, and you will spend all day looking for it.
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There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.
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The happiest lot for a man, as far as birth is concerned, is that it should be such as to give him but little occasion to think much about it.
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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 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.
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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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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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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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All frauds, like the wall daubed with untempered mortar ... always tend to the decay of what they are devised to support.
Richard Whately