C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Insult
Insults admit of no compensation.
It is often better not to see an insult than to avenge it.
What wilt thou do to thyself, who hast added insult to injury?
Even a hare, the weakest of animals, may insult a dead lion.
It is very clear that one way to challenge insults is to submit to them.
Fate never wounds more deep the generous heart than when a blockhead’s insult points the dart.
Insults are engendered from vulgar minds, like toadstools from a dunghill.
I once met a man who had forgiven an injury. I hope some day to meet the man who has forgiven an insult.
He who allows himself to be insulted deserves to be so; and insolence, if unpunished, goes on increasing.
A man who insults the modesty of a woman, as good as tells her that he has seen something in her conduct that warranted his presumption.
Injuries may be atoned for, and forgiven; but insults admit of no compensation. They degrade the mind in its own esteem, and force it to recover its level by revenge.
Receive no satisfaction for premeditated impertinence; forget it, forgive it, but keep him inexorably at a distance who offered it.
Injuries accompanied with insults are never forgiven: all men, on these occasions, are good haters, and lay out their revenge at compound interest.
The way to procure insults is to submit to them. A man meets with no more respect than he exacts.
It is only the vulgar who are always fancying themselves insulted. If a man treads on another’s toe in good society, do you think it is taken as an insult?
Thus the greater proportion of mankind are more sensitive to contemptuous language than unjust acts; for they can less easily bear insult than wrong.
Whatever be the motive of insult, it is always best to overlook it; for folly scarcely can deserve resentment, and malice is punished by neglect.
The slight that can be conveyed in a glance, in a gracious smile, in a wave of the hand, is often the ne plus ultra of art. What insult is so keen, or so keenly felt, as the polite insult, which it is impossible to resent.
As it is the nature of a kite to devour little birds, so it is the nature of some minds to insult and tyrannize over little people; this being the means which they use to recompense themselves for their extreme servility and condescension to their superiors; for nothing can be more reasonable than that slaves and flatterers should exact the same taxes on all below them which they themselves pay to all above them.