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

Distinction

Distinction, with a broad and powerful fan, puffing at all, winnows the light away.

Shakespeare.

There’s but the twinkling of a star
Between a man of peace and war;
A thief and justice, fool and knave,
A huffing off’cer and a slave;
A crafty lawyer and a pickpocket,
A great philosopher and a blockhead;
A formal preacher and a player,
A learn’d physician and man-slayer.

Butler.

All that causes one man to differ from another is a very slight thing. What is it that is the origin of beauty or ugliness, health or weakness, ability or stupidity? A slight difference in the organs, a little more or a little less bile. Yet this more or less is of infinite importance to men; and when they think otherwise they are mistaken.

Vauvenargues.

All our distinctions are accidental; beauty and deformity, though personal qualities, are neither entitled to praise nor censure; yet it so happens that they color our opinion of those qualities to which mankind have attached responsibility.

Zimmermann.

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