ation and to introduce into our judgments of our fellow-men a
secret element of gusto. If a thing is wrong for us, we should not dwell
upon the thought of it; or we shall soon dwell upon it with inverted
pleasure.

*****

There is a certain class, professors of that low morality so greatly
more distressing than the better sort of vice, to whom you must never
represent an act that was virtuous in itself, as attended by any other
consequences than a large family and fortune.

*****

All have some fault. The fault of each grinds down the hearts of those
about him, and--let us not blink the truth--hurries both him and them
into the grave. And when we find a man persevering indeed, in his fault,
as all of us do, and openly overtaken, as not all of us are, by its
consequences, to gloss the matte over, with too polite biographers,
is to do the work of the wrecker disfiguring beacons on a perilous
seaboard; but to call him bad, with a self-righteous chuckle, is to be
talking in one's sleep with Heedless and Too-bold in the arbour.

*****

The most influential books, and the truest in their influence, are
works of fiction. They do not pin the reader to a dogma, which he must
afterwards discover to be inexact; they do not teach a lesson, which he
must afterwards unlearn. They repeat, they rearrange, they clarify the
lessons of life; they disengage us from ourselves, they constrain us to
the acquaintance of others; and they show us the web of experience,
not as we can see it for ourselves, but with a singular change--that
monstrous, consuming ego of ours being, for the nonce, struck out. To be
so, they must be reasonably true to the human comedy; and any work that
is so serves the turn of instruction.

*****

Nature is a good guide through life, and the love of simple pleasures
next, if not superior, to virtue.

*****

The soul asks honour and not fame; to be upright, not to be successful;
to be good, not prosperous; to be essentially, not outwardly,
respectable.

*****

Practice is a more intricate and desperate business than the toughest
theorising; life is an affair of cavalry, where rapid judgment and
prompt action are alone possible and right.

*****

Each man should learn what is within him, that he may strive to mend;
he must be taught what is without him, that he may be kind to others. It
can never be wrong to tell him the truth; for, in his disputable state,
weaving as he goes his theory of life, stee