But can the noble mind forever brood,
The willing victim of a weary mood,
On heartless cares that squander life away,
And cloud young Genius brightening into day? [ Campbell ]

Like a led victim, to my death I'll go.
And, dying, bless the hand that gave the blow. [ Dryden ]

The surest way of making a dupe is to let your victim suppose you are his. [ Bulwer-Lytton ]

Anger is like a ruin, which, in falling upon its victim, breaks itself to pieces. [ Seneca ]

No greater misfortune can befall a man than to be the victim of an idea which has no hold on his life, still more which detaches him from it. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]

The human heart is often the victim of the sensations of the moment; success intoxicates it to presumption, and disappointment dejects and terrifies it. [ Volney ]

I do not know in the whole history of the world a hero, a worthy man, a prophet, a true Christian, who has not been the victim of the jealous, of a scamp, or of a sinister spirit. [ Voltaire ]

When we live habitually with the wicked, we become necessarily either their victim or their disciple; when we associate, on the contrary, with virtuous men, we form ourselves in imitation of their virtues, or, at least, lose every day something of our faults. [ Agapet ]

Irony is an insult conveyed in the form of a compliment placing its victim naked on a bed of briars and bristles, thinly covered with rose-leaves, adorning his brow with a crown of gold, which burns into his brain; teasing, and fretting, and riddling him through and through with incessant discharges of hot shot from a masked battery; laying bare the most sensitive and shrinking nerves of his mind, and then blandly touching them with ice, or smilingly pricking them with needles. [ E. P. Whipple ]