C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Malice
Malice is poisoned by her own venom.
Truth, wisdom, love, seek reasons; malice only seeks causes.
Malice blunts the point of wit.
Wit loses its point when dipped in malice.
Malice, scorned, puts out itself; but, argued, gives a kind of credit to a false accusation.
Malice drinketh up the greater part of its own poison.
Malice is of the boomerang character, and is apt to turn upon the projector.
Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, nor set down aught in malice.
Publish not men’s secret faults, for by disgracing them you make yourself of no repute.
When malice is joined to envy, there is given forth poisonous and feculent matter, as ink from the cuttle-fish.
There is an alchemy of quiet malice by which women can concoct a subtle poison, from ordinary trifles.
Wit loses its respect with the good, when seen in company with malice; and to smile at the jest which plants a thorn in another’s breast is to become a principal in the mischief.
Malice and hatred are very fretting and vexatious, and apt to make our minds sore and uneasy; but he that can moderate these affections will find ease in his mind.
It is to be believed or told that there is such malice in men as to rejoice in misfortunes, and from another’s woes to draw delight.
Even in the midst of compassion we feel within I know not what tart-sweet titillation of malicious pleasure in seeing others suffer; children have the same feeling.
Malice is the devil’s picture. Lust makes men brutish, and malice makes them devilish. Malice is mental murder; you may kill a man and never touch him; “Whosoever hateth his brother is a murderer.”
When malice has reason on its side, it looks forth bravely, and displays that reason in all its luster. When austerity and self-denial have not realized true happiness, and the soul returns to the dictates of nature, the reaction is fearfully extravagant.
Malice, in its false witness, promotes its tale with so cunning a confusion; so mingles truths with falsehoods, surmises with certainties, causes of no moment with matters capital, that the accused can absolutely neither grant nor deny, plead innocence nor confess guilt.
But for that blindness which is inseparable from malice, what terrible powers of evil would it possess! Fortunately for the world, its venom, like that of the rattlesnake, when most poisonous, clouds the eye of the reptile, and defeats its aim.
The venom that chills and curdles the warm current of life in man is secreted only in creeping and cold-blooded creatures; and the inveterate malignity that never forgets or forgives is found only in base and ignoble natures, whose aims are selfish, whose means are indirect, cowardly, and treacherous.
There is no small degree of malicious craft in fixing upon a season to give a mark of enmity and ill-will: a word—a look, which at one time would make no impression, at another time wounds the heart, and, like a shaft flying with the wind, pierces deep, which, with its own natural force, would scarce have readied the object aimed at.
As the malicious disposition of mankind is too well known, and the cruel pleasure which they take in destroying the reputation of others, the use we are to make of this knowledge is, to afford no handle for reproach; for bad as the world is, it seldom falls on any one who hath not given some slight cause for censure.