XL. The object of books is to teach us ignorance; that is, to throw a veil over nature, and persuade us that things are not what they are, but what the writer fancies or wishes them to be.
XLI. My little boy said the other day, ‘He could not tell what to do without a book to read—he should wander about without knowing what to do with himself.’ So have I wandered about, till now, and, waking from the dream of books at last, don’t know what to do with myself. My poor little fellow! may’st thou dream long amidst thy darling books, and never wake!
XLII. Political truth is a libel; religious truth, blasphemy.
XLIII. The greatest crime in the eye of the world is to endeavour to instruct or amend it.
XLIV. Weighing remote consequences in the mind is like weighing the air in scales.
XLV. A hypocrite seems to be the only perfect character—since it embraces the extremes of what human nature is, and of what it would be thought.
XLVI. The Scotch understanding differs from the English, as an Encyclopedia does from a circulating library. An Englishman is contented to pick up a few odds and ends of knowledge; a Scotchman is master of every subject alike. Here each individual has a particular hobby and favourite bye-path of his own: in Scotland learning is a common hack, which every one figures away with, and uses at his pleasure.
XLVII. A misanthropic writer might be called the Devil’s amanuensis.
XLVIII. To be a lord, a papist, and poor, is the most enviable distinction of humanity. There is all the pride and sense of independence, irritated and strengthened by being proscribed by power, and liable to be harassed by petty daily insults from every, the meanest vassal. What a situation to make the mind recoil from the world upon itself, and to sit and brood in moody grandeur and disdain of soul over fallen splendours and present indignities! It is just the life I should like to have led.
XLIX. The tone of good company is marked by the absence of personalities. Among well-informed persons, there are plenty of topics to discuss, without giving pain to any one present—without submitting to act the part of a butt, or of that still poorer creature, the wag that plays upon him.