C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Suspicion
Suspicion always haunts the guilty mind.
Suspicion invites treachery.
Whoever is suspicious invites treason.
Suspicion shall be all stuck full of eyes.
The virtue of a coward is suspicion.
Cæsar’s wife should be above suspicion.
Ignorance is the mother of suspicion.
See what a ready tongue suspicion hath!
Suspicion is very often a useless pain.
Suspicion follows close on mistrust.
Suspicion is the poison of true friendship.
A woman of honor should not suspect another of things she would not do herself.
Rakes are more suspicious than honest men.
The losing side is full of suspicion.
Suspicion has its dupes, as well as credulity.
There is no killing the suspicion that deceit has once begotten.
Suspicion is ever strong on the suffering side.
All seems infected that the infected spy, and all looks yellow to the jaundiced eye.
That knave preserves the pearl in his purse who considers all people purse-cuts.
Don’t seem to be on the lookout for crows, else you’ll set other people watching.
Suspicion is as great an enemy to wisdom as too much credulity.
Suspicion and persecution are weeds of the same dunghill, and flourish best together.
Disagreeable suspicions are usually the fruits of a second marriage.
Suspicion is a heavy armor, and with its own weight impedes more than protects.
Open suspecting of others comes of secretly condemning ourselves.
Whose own hard dealings teaches them suspect the thoughts of others!
Suspicions amongst thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly by twilight.
Suspicions***are weeds of the mind which grow of themselves, and most rapidly when least wanted.
Many men provoke others to overreach them by excessive suspicion; their extraordinary distrust in some sort justifies the deceit.
There is no rule more invariable than that we are paid for our suspicions by finding what we suspect.
The wolf dreads the pitfall, the hawk suspects the snare, and the kite the covered hook.
Suspicion is far more apt to be wrong than right; oftener unjust than just. It is no friend to virtue, and always an enemy to happiness.
A dull head thinks of no better way to show himself wise, than by suspecting everything in his way.
It is hardly possible to suspect another without having in one’s self the seeds of baseness the party is accused of.
Nature itself, after it has done an injury, will ever be suspicious; and no man can love the person he suspects.
There is nothing that makes a man suspect much, more than to know little; and, therefore, men should remedy suspicion by procuring to know more, and not to keep their suspicions to smother.
Suspicions among thoughts are like bats amongst birds, they ever fly to twilight; they are to be repressed, or, at least, well guarded, for they cloud the mind.
Suspicion is not less an enemy to virtue than to happiness: he that is already corrupt is naturally suspicious; and he that becomes suspicious will quickly be corrupt.
All persons as they become less prosperous, are the more suspicious. They take everything as an affront; and from their conscious weakness, presume that they are neglected.
Surmise is the gossamer that malice blows on fair reputations, the corroding dew that destroys the choice blossom. Surmise is primarily the squint of suspicion, and suspicion is established before it is confirmed.
He that lives in perpetual suspicion lives the life of a sentinel,—of a sentinel never relieved, whose business it is to look out for and expect an enemy, which is an evil not very far short of perishing by him.
As there are dim-sighted people who live in a sort of perpetual twilight, so there are some who, having neither much clearness of head nor a very elevated tone of morality, are perpetually haunted by suspicions of everybody and everything.
Never put much confidence in such as put no confidence in others. A man prone to suspect evil is mostly looking in his neighbor for what he sees in himself. As to the pure all things are pure, even so to the impure all things are impure.
Any base heart can devise means of vileness, and affix the ugly shapings of its own fancy to the actions of those around him; but it requires loftiness of mind, and the heaven-born spirit of virtue, to imagine greatness where it is not, and to deck the sordid objects of nature in the beautiful robes of loveliness and light.