C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.

Deformity

Do you suppose we owe nothing to Pope’s deformity? He said to himself, “If my person be crooked, my verses shall be straight.”

Hazlitt.

In nature there’s no blemish but the mind;
None can be call’d deform’d but the unkind:
Virtue is beauty; but the beauteous evil
Are empty trunks, o’er-flourish’d by the devil.

Shakespeare.

Deformity of the heart I call
The worst deformity of all;
For what is form, or what is face,
But the soul’s index, or its case?

Colton.

Deformity is either natural, voluntary or adventitious, being either caused by God’s unseen Providence (by men nicknamed chance), or by men’s cruelty.

Fuller.

Deform’d, unfinish’d, sent before my time
Into this breathing world, scarce half made up,
And that so lamely and unfashionably,
That dogs bark at me, as I halt by them.
But I,—that am not shap’d for sportive tricks,
Nor made to court an amorous looking-glass;
I that am rudely stamp’d, and want love’s majesty,
To strut before a wanton ambling nymph.

Shakespeare.

From whence comes it that a cripple in body does not irritate us, and that a crippled mind enrages us? It is because a cripple sees that we go right, and a distorted mind says that it is we who go astray. But for that we should have more pity and less rage.

Pascal.

Deformity is daring;
It is its essence to o’ertake mankind
By heart and soul, and make itself the equal—
Ay, the superior of the rest. There is
A spur in its halt movements, to become
All that the others cannot, in such things
As still are free for both, to compensate
For stepdame Nature’s avarice at first.

Byron.

Nature herself started back when thou wert born,
And cried, “the work’s not mine.”
The midwife stood aghast; and when she saw
Thy mountain back and thy distorted legs,
Thy face itself,
Half-minted with the royal stamp of man,
And half o’ercome with beast, she doubted long
Whose right in thee were more;
And know not if to burn thee in the flames
Were not the holier work.

Lee.

Why, love forswore me in my mother’s womb:
And, for I should not deal in her soft laws,
She did corrupt frail nature with some bribe
To shrink mine arm up like a wither’d shrub,
To make an envious mountain on my back,
Where sits deformity to make my body;
To shape my legs of an unequal size;
To disproportion me in every part,
Like to a chaos, or an unlick’d bear-whelp,
That carries no impression like the dam.
And am I then a man to be belov’d?

Shakespeare.

Am I to blame, if nature threw my body
In so perverse a mould! yet when she cast
Her envious hand upon my supple joints,
Unable to resist, and rumpled them
On heaps in their dark lodging; to revenge
Her bungled work, she stamped my mind more fair,
And as from chaos, huddled and deform’d,
The gods struck fire, and lighted up the lamps
That beautify the sky; so she inform’d
This ill-shap’d body with a daring soul,
And, making less than man, she made me more.

Lee.

Many a man has risen to eminence under the powerful reaction of his mind in fierce counter-agency to the scorn of the unworthy, daily evoked by his personal defects, who with a handsome person would have sunk into the luxury of a careless life under the tranquillizing smiles of continual admiration.

De Quincey.

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