For, after all, we are vessels of a very limited content. Not all men can read all books; it is only in a chosen few that any man will find his appointed food; and the fittest lessons are the most, palatable, and make themselves welcome to the mind. ***** It is all very fine to talk about tramps and morality. Six hours of police surveillance (such as I have had) or one brutal rejection from an inn-door change your views upon the subject like a course of lectures. As long as you keep in the upper regions, with all the world bowing to you as you go, social arrangements have a very handsome air; but once get under the wheels and you wish society were at the devil. I will give most respectable men a fortnight of such a life, and then I will offer them twopence for what remains of their morality. ***** I hate cynicism a great deal worse than I do the devil; unless, perhaps, the two were the same thing? And yet ‘tis a good tonic; the cold tub and bath-towel of the sentiments; and positively necessary to life in cases of advanced sensibility. ***** Most men, finding themselves the authors of their own disgrace, rail the louder against God or destiny. Most men, when they repent, oblige their friends to share the bitterness of that repentance. ***** Delay, they say, begetteth peril; but it is rather this itch of doing that undoes men. ***** Every man has a sane spot somewhere. ***** That is never a bad wind that blows where we want to go. ***** It is a great thing if you can persuade people that they are somehow or other partakers in a mystery. It makes them feel bigger. ***** But it is an evil age for the gypsily inclined among men. He who can sit squarest on a three-legged stool, he it is who has the wealth and glory. ***** For truth that is suppressed by friends is the readiest weapon of the enemy. ***** But O, what a cruel thing is a farce to those engaged in it! ***** It is not always the most faithful believer who makes the cunningest apostle. ***** Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man. ***** A man may live in dreams, and yet be unprepared for their realisation. ***** ‘Be soople, Davie, in things immaterial.’ ***** No class of man is altogether bad; but each has its own faults and virtues. ***** But it is odd enough, the very women who profess most contempt for mankind as a sex seem to find even its ugliest particulars rather lively and high-minded in their own sons. ***** To cling to what is left of any damaged quality is virtue in the man. ***** But we have no bravery nowadays, and, even in books, must all pretend to be as dull and foolish as our neighbours. ***** It always warms a man to see a woman brave. ***** Condescension is an excellent thing, but it is strange how one-sided the pleasure of it is! ***** Some strand of our own misdoing is involved in every quarrel. ***** There was never an ill thing made better by meddling. *****