C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Ill-Nature
Think of a man in a chronic state of anger!
Some natures are so sour and ungrateful that they are never to be obliged.
Must I give way and room to your rash choler?
By indulging this fretful temper, you alienate those on whose affection much of your comfort depends.
Ill-nature is a sort of running sore of the disposition.
Ill-nature consists of a proneness to do ill turns, attended with a secret joy upon the sight of any mischief that befalls another.
Though I carry always some ill-nature about me, yet it is, I hope, no more than is in this world necessary for a preservative.
You have only to watch other ill-natured people to resolve to be unlike them.
Ill-humor is nothing more than an inward feeling of our own want of merit, a dissatisfaction with ourselves which is always united with an envy that foolish vanity excites.
The world is so full of ill-nature that I have lampoons sent me by people who cannot spell, and satires composed by those who scarce know how to write.
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 vigor and checks its improvement; that creeps on with hourly depredations, and taints and vitiates what it cannot consume.