“The true rule, in determining to embrace, or reject any thing, is not whether it have any evil in it; but whether it have more of evil, than of good.”

Source: Lady Midnight

A Vindication of Natural Society (1756)
Context: We scarce ever had a prince, who by fraud, or violence, had not made some infringement on the constitution. We scarce ever had a parliament which knew, when it attempted to set limits to the royal authority, how to set limits to its own. Evils we have had continually calling for reformation, and reformations more grievous than any evils. Our boasted liberty sometimes trodden down, sometimes giddily set up, and ever precariously fluctuating and unsettled; it has only been kept alive by the blasts of continual feuds, wars, and conspiracies.

Introduction, p. 13
Elements of Rhetoric (1828)

The Fantastic Imagination (1893)
Context: "But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never meant!"
 Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things: what matter whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot claim putting them there! One difference between God's work and man's is, that, while God's work cannot mean more than he meant, man's must mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God's things, his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts; therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.

Source: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (1759), Chapter 28

Vẻ đẹp và quyền năng của thơ ca (tiểu luận) - Mai Văn Phấn http://maivanphan.vn/MaiVanPhan/32/398/785/1135/Tieu-luan-tho/Ve-dep-va-quyen-nang-cua-tho-ca--tieu-luan----Mai-Van-Phan.aspx

Case of John Lambert and others (1793), 22 How. St. Tr. 1018.

Walter Scott has not read a review of himself for thirteen years.
Letter to his publisher, John Murray (3 November 1821).