Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Ill-Nature

The ill-natured man gives himself a large field to expatiate in: he exposes those failings in human nature which the other would cast a veil over.

By indulging this fretful temper you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends.

But the greatest part of those who set mankind at defiance by hourly irritation, and who live but to infuse malignity and multiply enemies, have no hopes to foster, no designs to promote, nor any expectations of attaining power by insolence, or of climbing to greatness by trampling on others. They give up all sweets of kindness for the sake of peevishness, petulance, or gloom; and alienate the world by neglect of the common forms of civility, and breach of the established laws of conversation.

Peevishness may be considered the canker of life, that destroys its vigour, and checks its improvement; that creeps on with hourly depredations, and taints and vitiates what it cannot consume.

Though it [peevishness] breaks not out in paroxysms of outrage, it wears out happiness by slow corrosion.

Some natures are so sour and ungrateful that they are never to be obliged.

Ill-nature … consists of a proneness to do ill turns, attended with a secret joy upon the sight of any mischief that befalls another, and of an utter insensibility of any kindness done him.

Wheresoever you see ingratitude, you may as infallibly conclude that there is a growing stock of ill-nature in that breast, as you may know that man to have the plague upon whom you see the tokens.

Anything that is apt to disturb the world, and to alienate the affections of men from one another, such as cross and distasteful humours, is either expressly, or by clear consequence and deduction, forbidden in the New Testament.