I do not know any moral to be deduced from this view of the subject [of personal character], but one, namely, that we should mind our own business, cultivate our good qualities, if we have any, and irritate ourselves less about the absurdities of other people, which neither we nor they can help. I grant there is something in which I have said which I might be made to glance towards the doctrine of original sin, grace, election, reprobation, or the Gnostic Principle that acts did not determine the virtue or vice of the character; and in those doctrines, so far as they are deducible from what I have said, I agree -- but always with a salvo.

Author: William Hazlitt