*
To make our idea of morality centre on forbidden acts is to
defile the imagination 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.
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