A speculative despair is unpardonable where it our duty to act.

It is a general popular error to suppose the loudest complainers for the public to be the most anxious for its welfare.

Unsociable humors are contracted in solitude, which will, in the end, not fail of corrupting the understanding as well as the manners, and of utterly disqualifying a man for the satisfactions and duties of life. Men must be taken as they are, and we neither make them or ourselves better by flying from or quarreling with them.

Art is a partnership not only between those who are living but between those who are dead and those who are yet to be born.

I do ride contend against the advantages of distrust. In the world we live in, it is but too necessary. Some of old called it the very sinews of discretion.

Poetry, with all its obscurity, has a more general as well as a more powerful dominion over the passions than the art of painting.

Prejudice is of ready application in the emergency; it previously engages the mind in a steady course of wisdom and virtue, and does not leave the man hesitating in the moment of decision, skeptical, puzzled and unresolved. Prejudice renders a man's virtue his habit; and not a series of unconnected acts. Through past prejudice, his duty becomes part of his nature.