It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure. Desire and curiosity are the two eyes through which he sees the world in the most enchanted colours...and the man may squander his estate and come to beggary, but if he keeps these two amulets he is still rich in the possibilities of pleasure.

All human beings are commingled out of good and evil.

Do not forget that even as "to work is to worship" so to be cheery is to worship also, and to be happy is the first step to being pious.

Perpetual devotion to what a man calls his business is only to be sustained by perpetual neglect of many other things.

The rain is falling all around, It falls on field and tree, It rains on the umbrellas here, And on the ships at sea. - Rain

In marriage, a man becomes slack and selfish, and undergoes a fatty degeneration of his moral being.

The mark of a Scot of all classes [is that] he ... remembers and cherishes the memory of his forebears, good or bad; and there burns alive in him a sense of identity with the dead even to the twentieth generation.