CXXIV. Even infamy may be oftentimes a source of secret self-complacency. We smile at the impotence of public opinion, when we can survive its worst censures.
CXXV. Simplicity of character is the natural result of profound thought.
CXXVI. The affected modesty of most women is a decoy for the generous, the delicate, and unsuspecting; while the artful, the bold, and unfeeling either see or break through its slender disguises.
CXXVII. We as often repent the good we have done as the ill.
CXXVIII. The measure of any man’s virtue is what he would do, if he had neither the laws nor public opinion, nor even his own prejudices, to control him.
CXXIX. We like the expression of Raphael’s faces without an edict to enforce it. I do not see why there should not be a taste in morals formed on the same principle.
CXXX. Where a greater latitude is allowed in morals, the number of examples of vice may increase, but so do those of virtue: at least, we are surer of the sincerity of the latter. It is only the exceptions to vice, that arise neither from ignorance nor hypocrisy, that are worth counting.
CXXXI. The fear of punishment may be necessary to the suppression of vice; but it also suspends the finer motives to virtue.
CXXXII. No wise man can have a contempt for the prejudices of others; and he should even stand in a certain awe of his own, as if they were aged parents and monitors. They may in the end prove wiser than he.
CXXXIII. We are only justified in rejecting prejudices, when we can explain the grounds of them; or when they are at war with nature, which is the strongest prejudice of all.