C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Comparisons
Comparisons are odious.
Comparisons do ofttime great grievance.
The superiority of some men is merely local. They are great, because their associates are little.
Like master, like man.
Thus I knew that pups are like dogs, and kids like goats; so I used to compare great things with small.
When two persons do the self-same thing, it oftentimes falls out that in the one it is criminal, in the other it is not so; not that the thing itself is different, but he who does it.
Is it possible your pragmatical worship should not know that the comparisons made between wit and wit, courage and courage, beauty and beauty, birth and birth, are always odious and ill taken?
When the moon shone, we did not see the candle, so doth the greater glory dim the less; a substitute shines brightly as a king, until a king be by; and then his state empties itself, as doth an inland brook into the main of waters.
The botanist looks upon the astronomer as a being unworthy of his regard; and he that is growing great and happy by electrifying a bottle wonders how the world can be engaged by trifling prattle about war and peace.
Yet why repine? I have seen mansions on the verge of Wales that convert my farm-house into a Hampton Court, and where they speak of a glazed window as a great piece of magnificence. All things figure by comparison.