Critics ought never to be consulted, but while errors may yet be rectified or insipidity suppressed. But when the book has once been dismissed into the world, and can be no more retouched, I know not whether a very different conduct should not be prescribed, and whether firmness and spirit may not sometimes be of use to overpower arrogance and repel brutality.

A gentleman who had been very unhappy in marriage, married immediately after his wife died; it was the triumph of hope over experience.

No evil is insupportable but that which is accompanied with consciousness of wrong.

Come, let me know what it is that makes a Scotch man happy!

Repentance, however difficult to be practiced, is, if it be explained without superstition, easily understood. Repentance is the relinquishment of any practice from the conviction that it has offended God.

Ignorance, when it is voluntary, is criminal.

No place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library.