CCXIV. I had rather be deformed than a dwarf and well-made. The one may be attributed to accident; the other looks like a deliberate insult on the part of nature.
CCXV. Personal deformity, in the well-disposed, produces a fine placid expression of countenance; in the ill-tempered and peevish, a keen, sarcastic one.
CCXVI. People say ill-natured things without design, but not without having a pleasure in them.
CCXVII. A person who blunders upon system, has a secret motive for what he does, unknown to himself.
CCXVIII. If any one by his general conduct contrives to part friends, he may not be aware that such is the tendency of his actions, but assuredly it is their motive. He has more pleasure in seeing others cold and distant, than cordial and intimate.
CCXIX. A person who constantly meddles to no purpose, means to do harm, and is not sorry to find he has succeeded.
CCXX. Cunning is natural to mankind. It is the sense of our weakness, and an attempt to effect by concealment what we cannot do openly and by force.
CCXXI. In love we never think of moral qualities, and scarcely of intellectual ones. Temperament and manner alone (with beauty) excite love.
CCXXII. There is no one thoroughly despicable. We cannot descend much lower than an ideot; and an ideot has some advantages over a wise man.
CCXXIII. Comparisons are odious, because they reduce every one to a standard he ought not to be tried by, or leave us in possession only of those claims which we can set up, to the entire exclusion of others. By striking off the common qualities, the remainder of excellence is brought down to a contemptible fraction. A man may be six feet high, and only an inch taller than another. In comparisons, this difference of an inch is the only thing thought of or ever brought into question. The greatest genius or virtue soon dwindles into nothing by such a mode of computation.