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

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The power of duly appreciating little things belongs to a great mind.
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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 folly to expect men to do all that they may reasonably be expected to do.
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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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As the flower is before the fruit, so is faith before good works.
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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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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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Honesty is the best policy but he who is governed by that maxim is not an honest man.
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Galileo probably would have escaped persecution if his discoveries could have been disproved.
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The tendency of party spirit has ever been to disguise and propagate and support error.
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To follow imperfect, uncertain, or corrupted traditions, in order to avoid erring in our own judgment, is but to exchange one danger for another.
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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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Manners are one of the greatest engines of influence ever given to man.
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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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Of all hostile feelings, envy is perhaps the hardest to be subdued, because hardly any one owns it even to himself, but looks out for one pretext after another to justify his hostility.
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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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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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Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.
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Never argue at the dinner table, for the one who is not hungry gets the best of the argument.
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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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