Love Quote by Walter Scott

Scott treats language like a stray arrow: not merely capable of harm, but dangerously indifferent to intention. The couplets move with the clean inevitability of a proverb, yet they carry the darker implication that moral responsibility doesn’t stop at what we meant to do. “At random” is the knife-twist. It suggests that the most consequential blows in social life are often unpremeditated, delivered by people who feel innocent precisely because they weren’t aiming.

The rhyme tightens the argument into something you can’t easily shrug off: meant/broken locks accident to aftermath. Scott’s “shaft” belongs to a world of archers and honor, but he smuggles in a modern psychology. Speech is the new projectile, loosed casually in company, and the target is invisible: “a heart that’s broken” doesn’t announce itself. That’s the subtextual warning to the quick-tongued and the complacently sincere. You don’t get to audit the room for vulnerability before you speak; you speak into it.

As a novelist steeped in Romantic-era sensibility, Scott is also defending emotional interiority as real terrain, not melodrama. In early 19th-century Britain, with its codes of politeness and reputation, casual remarks could ripple into lasting social and private damage. The lines flatter no one with the fantasy of total control. They ask for something harder: an ethics of speech that accounts for chance, misfire, and the unseen bruises people carry into ordinary conversation.