“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.”
Quote by Richard Whately
“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.”
Source: Essays: With Annotations by Richard Whately
“Trust, therefore, for the overcoming of a difficulty, not to long-continued study after you have once become bewildered, but to repeated trials at intervals.”
“The censure of frequent and long parentheses has led writers into the preposterous expedient of leaving out the marks by which they are indicated. It is no cure to a lame man to take away his crutches.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“The first requisite of style, not only in rhetoric, but in all compositions, is perspicuity.”
Source: Elements of Rhetoric: Comprising an Analysis of the Laws of Moral Evidence and of Persuasion : with Rules for Argumentative Composition and Elocution
“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.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“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.”
“There is no right faith in believing what is true, unless we believe it because it is true.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“Vices and frailties correct each other, like acids and alkalies. If each vicious man had but one vice, I do not know how the world could go on.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
“The relief that is afforded to mere want, as want, tends to increase that want.”
Source: Introductory Lectures on Political Economy. (Introduction to political economy. Lecture IX.)
“If all our wishes were gratified, most of our pleasures would be destroyed.”
Source: Thoughts and Apophthegms: From the Writings of Archbishop Whateley
