Though not always called upon to condemn ourselves, it is always safe to suspect ourselves.

To be always thinking about your manners is not the way to make them good; the very perfection of manners is not to think about yourself.

Better too much form than too little.

Controversy, though always an evil in itself, is sometimes a necessary evil.

When men have become heartily wearied of licentious anarchy, their eagerness has been proportionately great to embrace the opposite extreme of rigorous despotism.

The attendant on William Rufus, who discharged at a deer an arrow, which glanced against a tree and killed the king, was no murderer, because he had no such design. And, on the other hand, a man who should lie in wait to assassinate another, and pull the trigger of a gun with that intent, would be morally a murderer, not the less though the gun should chance to miss fire.

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.