In employing fiction to make truth clear and goodness attractive, we are only following the example which every Christian ought to propose to himself.

All the walks of literature are infested with mendicants for fame, who attempt to excite our interest by exhibiting all the distortions of their intellects and stripping the covering from all the putrid sores of their feelings.

Those who seem to load the public taste are, in general, merely outrunning it in the direction which it is spontaneously pursuing.

Our estimate of a character always depends much on the manner in which that character affects our own interests and passions.

Every age and every nation has certain characteristic vices, which prevail almost universally, which scarcely any person scruples to avow, and which even rigid moralists but faintly censure. Succeeding generations change the fashion of their morals with the fashion of their hats and their coaches; take some other kind of wickedness under their patronage, and wonder at the depravity of their ancestors.

What society wants is a new motive, not a new cant.

Grief, which disposes gentle natures to retirement, to inaction, and to meditation, only makes restless spirits more restless.