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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.

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
Superstitions
Excess
Vanity
Defined
Misdirection
Feeling
Vanities
Religious
Devising
Feelings
Superstition
Men
Exhausting

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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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When a man says he wants to work, what he means is that he wants wages.
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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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Some men's reputation seems like seed-wheat, which thrives best when brought from a distance.
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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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It is the neglect of timely repair that makes rebuilding necessary.
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It is folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
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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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As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
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Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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One way in which fools succeed where wise men fail is that through ignorance of the danger they sometimes go coolly about a hazardous business.
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It is one thing to wish to have truth on our side, and another to wish sincerely to be on the side of truth.
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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.
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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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The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
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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.
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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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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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A man is called selfish not for pursuing his own good, but for neglecting his neighbor's.
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