C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Distrust
What loneliness is more lonely than distrust?
In love the deceit generally outstrips the distrust.
The best use one can make of his mind is to distrust it.
A usurper always distrusts the whole world.
Doubt the man who swears to his devotion.
Women distrust men too much in general, and too little in particular.
It is difficult for a woman to try to be anything good when she is not believed in.
Jealousy lives upon distrust, becomes madness, or ceases entirely, when we pass from doubt to certainty.
This feeling of distrust is always the last which a great mind acquires; he is deceived for a long time.
Excessive distrust is not less hurtful than its opposite. Most men become useless to him who is unwilling to risk being deceived.
Zoroaster said, when in doubt abstain; but this does not always apply. At cards, when in doubt take the trick.
Self-reliance is demanded in woman; the supreme fall of falls is the first doubt of one’s self.
As health lies in labor, and there is no royal road to it but through toil, so there is no republican road to safety but in constant distrust.
A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity nor conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
The doubts of love are never to be wholly overcome; they grow with its various anxieties, timidities, and tenderness, and are the very fruits of the reverence in which the admired object is beheld.
Self-distrust is the cause of most of our failures. In the assurance of strength there is strength, and they are the weakest, however strong, who have no faith in themselves or their powers.
Nothing is more certain of destroying any good feeling that may be cherished towards us than to show distrust. To be suspected as an enemy is often enough to make a man become so; the whole matter is over, there is no farther use of guarding against it. On the contrary, confidence leads us naturally to act kindly, we are affected by the good opinion which others entertain of us, and we are not easily induced to lose it.