“There must be more malice than love in the hearts of all wits.”

It is highly convenient to believe in the infinite mercy of God when you feel the need of mercy, but remember also his infinite justice.

All government is an evil, but, of the two form’s of that evil, democracy or monarchy, the sounder is monarchy; the more able to do its will, democracy.

The greatest geniuses have always attributed everything to God, as if conscious of being possessed of a spark of His divinity.

No man, perhaps, is so wicked as to commit evil for its own sake. Evil is generally committed under the hope of some advantage the pursuit of virtue seldom obtains. Yet the most successful result of the most virtuous heroism is never without its alloy.

We are a compound of both here and hereafter; we shall be made responsible for the actions of both while here. Anything beyond this is beyond our power to prove, and would be of no real value if we could.

Satan is to be punished eternally in the end, but for a while he triumphs.

Nothing is difficult; it is only we who are indolent.

The only legitimate artists in England are the architects.

Mistrusts sometimes come over one’s mind of the justice of God. But let a real misery come again, and to whom do we fly? To whom do we instinctively and immediately look up?

Newton’s health, and confusion to mathematics.

Temperance in everything is requisite for happiness.

Danger is the very basis of superstition. It produces a searching after help supernaturally when human means are no longer supposed to be available.

How difficult it is to get men to believe that any other man can or does act from disinterestedness!

Fortunately for serious minds, a bias recognized is a bias sterilized.

Do your duty, and don’t swerve from it. Do that which your conscience tells you to be right, and leave the consequences to God.

Some persons are so devotional they have not one bit of true religion in them.

For at least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols

There are no ‘good’ or ‘bad’ people. Some are a little better or a little worse, but all are activated more by misunderstanding than malice.

Forgiveness requires a sense that bad behaviour is a sign of suffering rather than malice.

And also read those whose darkness or malice or madness or greatness you can’t understand because only in this way will you grow, outlive yourself, and become what you are.

In an age of malice and bad faith on many sides, I reread White or Thurber or Mitchell and am reminded again that good writing is done, as I said in my elegy for Salinger, with an active eye and ear and an ardent heart, and in no other way.

You should not feel that your path is the only right path and that other paths are wrong. You mustn’t bear malice toward others.

Mischief and malice grow on the same branch of the tree of evil.

Bottling up his malice to be suppressed and brought out with increased violence.