Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

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

Suspicion

Suspicions among faults are like bats among birds,—they ever fly by twilight: certainly they are to be repressed, or, at the least, well guarded: for they cloud the mind, they lose friends, and they check with business, whereby business cannot go on currently and constantly: they dispose kings to tyranny, husbands to jealousy, wise men to irresolution and melancholy: they are defects, not in the heart, but in the brain; for they take place in the stoutest natures…. There is nothing 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 in smother.

Suspiciousness is as great an enemy to wisdom as too much credulity.

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.

It is too common for us to learn the frauds by which ourselves have suffered: men who are once persuaded that deceit will be employed against them sometimes think the same arts justified by the necessity of defence. Even they whose virtue is too well established to give way to example, or to be shaken by sophistry, must yet feel their love of mankind diminished with their esteem, and grow less zealous for the happiness of those by whom they imagine their own happiness endangered.

Nature itself, after it has done an injury, will ever be suspicious; and no man can love the person he suspects.

As there are dim-sighted persons, 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. Such a man attributes—judging in great measure from himself—interested and selfish motives to every one. Accordingly, having no great confidence in his own penetration, he gives no one credit for an open and straightforward character.