Richard Whately Quotes

God, that all-powerful Creator of nature and architect of the world, has impressed man with no character so proper to distinguish him from other animals, as by the faculty of speech.

But it has, in addition, an even more precious quality - a consciousness of the human intelligence, the human spirit and that man is a social creature.

Whichever theory we adopt to give a rational explanation of human existence, that theory must take into account and explain the mental nature we see at work in all modern communities.

If God had wanted me otherwise, He would have created me otherwise.

God made the Idiot for practice, and then He made the School Board.

Truth is, I'll never know all there is to know about you just as you will never know all there is to know about me. Humans are by nature too complicated to be understood fully. So, we can choose either to approach our fellow human beings with suspicion or to approach them with an open mind, a dash of optimism and a great deal of candour.

Man, who is he? Too bad, to be the work of God: Too good for the work of chance!

The truth is, man is hereunto led by reason which is his nature.

I trust people to be human. Sometimes you do things that make amazing amounts of sense; sometimes you do things that don't make any sense whatsoever.

Reason in man is rather like God in the world.

God has not created anything better than Reason, or anything more perfect, or more beautiful than Reason…. God’s wrath is caused by disregard of it.

Man is a rational animal, endowed by nature with rights and with an innate sense of justice.

The lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them.

Man did not evolve but was created.

Reason, in fact, is a thing of God, inasmuch as there is nothing which God the Maker of all has not provided, disposed, ordained by reason.

From a purely positivist point of view, man is the most mysterious and disconcerting of all the objects met with by science.

Nature is a divine art; it cannot be the artist. It is a dominical book and cannot be the scribe. It is an embroidery and cannot be the embroiderer. It is a register and cannot be the accountant. It is the law and cannot be the power.

I understand and I don't understand human beings.

Guess what? Human beings are complex.

No experiment can be more interesting than that we are now trying, and which we trust will end in establishing the fact, that man may be governed by reason and truth.

God created hand, head, and heart; the hand for the deed, the head for the world, the heart for mysticism.

I wonder who it was defined man as a rational animal. It was the most premature definition ever given. Man is many things, but he is not rational.

Being so rational, we have created a very simple version of ourselves.

We are all as God made us and frequently much worse.

To be rational is so glorious a thing, that two-legged creatures generally content themselves with the title.