Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Malice

"Emulation admires and strives to imitate great actions; envy is only moved to malice." - Honoré de Balzac

"We never deceive for a good purpose; knavery adds malice to falsehood." - Jean de La Bruyère

"Envy is an ill-natured vice, and is made up of meanness and malice. It wishes the force of goodness to be strained, and the measure of happiness abated. It laments over prosperity, and sickens at the sight of health. It oftentimes wants spirit as well as good nature." - Jeremy Collier

"Vanity backbites more than Malice." - Benjamin Franklin

"Malice may be sometimes out of breath, envy never." - Charles Montagu Halifax, 1st Earl of Halifax, Lord Halifax

"Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility, and the young should not only shun it, but by the most thorough culture relieve themselves from all temptation to indulge in it." - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

"Gossip is always a personal confession either of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbors made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may." - Josiah Gilbert Holland, also Joshua Gilbert Holland

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Malice is poisoned by her own venom." - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"Truth, wisdom, love, seek reasons; malice only seeks causes." - Johann Kaspar Lavater

"With malice toward none, with charity for all, with firmness in the right, as God gives us to see the right, let us strive to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation's wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle, and for his widow, and his orphans - to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations." - Abraham Lincoln

"We can never be despised as much as we deserve. Pity and commiseration are mingled with some esteem for the thing we pity; the things we laugh at we consider worthless. I do not think there is as much unhappiness in us as vanity, nor as much malice as stupidity. We are not so full of evil as of inanity; we are not as wretched as we are worthless." - Michel de Montaigne, fully Lord Michel Eyquem de Montaigne

"Malice swallows the greater part of its own venom." - Publius Syrus

"May those who represent advanced views bear in mind that true wisdom is always joined with mildness, that malice never converts the erring but strengthens him in his attitude, and that it is very unfitting to combat error (so long as this does not assume the aspect of injustice) with the weapons of hatred." - Gabriel Riesser

"There’s no possibility of being witty without a little ill-nature; the malice of a good thing is the barb that makes it stick." - Richard Brinsley Sheridan

"Gossip is always a personal confession of malice or imbecility; it is a low, frivolous, and too often a dirty business. There are neighborhoods where it rages like a pest; churches are split in pieces by it, and neighbor made enemies for life. Let the young avoid or cure it while they may." - Jack Holland

"A sudden lie may be sometimes only manslaughter upon truth; but by a carefully constructed equivocation, truth always is with malice a forethought deliberately murdered." - John Morley, 1st Viscount Morely of Blackburn, Lord Morley

"To attune your spirit to your own special place in the world is never to know envy, or malice, or despair." - Carlos Castaneda, fully Carlos César Salvador Arana Castaneda

"Malice sucks up the greater part of its own venom, and poisons itself with it." -

"If malice or envy were tangible and had a shape, it would be the shape of a boomerang." - Charley Reese

"Have you ever considered how dreadful it would be if our lives had no appointed end but went on forever? Can you imagine that as far as the eye can see into the future we should remain enmeshed in all the desires and troubles of this life and that all the ensuing envy, hatred and malice, our own and other people’s should continue to pile up undiminished? If you have ever considered how intolerable the burden of our life would be without the understood certainty that it has an appointed end, you know that death comes to all, even the most fortunate, not as an enemy but as a deliverance." - Albert Schweitzer

"Never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity." - Nick Dimos

"Never ascribe to malice that which can be adequately explained by ignorance." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice, and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"At least two thirds of our miseries spring from human stupidity, human malice and those great motivators and justifiers of malice and stupidity, idealism, dogmatism and proselytizing zeal on behalf of religious or political idols." -

"Today. Mend a quarrel. Search out a friend. Dismiss suspicion and replace it with trust. Write a love letter. Share some treasure. Give a soft answer. Encourage youth. Manifest your loyalty in a word or deed. Keep a promise. Find the time. Forego a grudge. Forgive an enemy. Listen. Apologize if you were wrong. Try to understand. Flout envy. Examine demands on others. Think first of someone else. Appreciate, be kind, be gentle. Laugh a little more. Deserve confidence. Take up arms against malice. Decry complacency. Express your gratitude. Worship your God. Gladden the heart of a child. Take pleasure in the beauty and wonder of the earth. Speak your love. Speak it again. Still speak it again. Speak it still once again." - Author Unknown NULL

"When malice has reason on its side, it looks forth bravely, and displays that reason in all its luster. When austerity and self-denial have not realized true happiness, and the soul returns to the dictates of nature, the reaction is fearfully extravagant." - Blaise Pascal

"The only things in which we can be said to have any property are our actions. Our thoughts may be bad, yet produce no poison; they may be good, yet produce no fruit. Our riches may be taken away by misfortune, our reputation by malice, our spirits by calamity, our health by disease, our friends by death. But our actions must follow us beyond the grave; with respect to them alone, we cannot say that we shall carry nothing with us when we die, neither that we shall go naked out of the world." - Charles Caleb Colton

"The working of great institutions is mainly the result of... routine, petty malice, self-interest, carelessness, and sheer mistakes. Only a small fraction is thought." - George Santayana

"Where there is envy, there is malice." - Greek Proverbs

"There is no possible excuse for a guarded lie. Enthusiastic and impulsive people will sometimes falsify thoughtlessly, but equivocation is malice prepense." - Hosea Ballou

"Malice hurts itself most." - John Clarke

"A sudden lie may be sometimes only manslaughter upon truth; but by a carefully constructed equivocation, truth always is with malice a forethought deliberately murdered." -

"Moral codes have become necessary because evolution, in liberating humankind from complete dependence on instincts, has also made it possible for us to act with malice that no organism ruled by instincts alone could possess." - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, native form is Csíkszentmihályi Mihály

"Never ascribe to malice, that which can be explained by incompetence." - Napoleon Bonaparte, Napoleon I

"When malice is joined to envy, there is given forth poisonous and feculent matter, as ink from the cuttlefish." - Plutarch, named Lucius Mestrius Plutarchus after becoming Roman citizen NULL

"The classes of citizens are three. The rich are useless, always lusting after more. Those who have not, and live in want, are a menace, ridden with envy and fooled by demagogues; their malice stings the owners. Of the three, the middle part saves cities: it guards the order a community establishes." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Praise is a debt we owe to the virtues of others, and is due to our own from all whom malice has not made mutes, or envy struck dumb." -

"Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them." -

"One who permits malice is not a person of wisdom." - Socrates NULL

"He that keeps Malice, harbours a Viper in his Breast... Malice drinketh up the greatest Part of its own Poison." - Thomas Fuller

"Almost all the trouble in the world is created by things people think, say and write. Words of anger, malice, hatred, resentment, jealously, like physical blows, cause people to hit back. Over-bearing, demanding words create determined resistance. And the attitudes of mind back of them, even though we do not speak the words, are sensed by others. For the telepathic power of thought is no longer merely a theory. Thoughts are things." - Wilferd Peterson, fully Wilferd Arlan Peterson

"We prefer a person with vivacity and high spirits, though bordering up on insolence, to the timid and pusillanimous; we are fonder of wit joined to malice than of dullness without it." - William Hazlitt