Revenge: it's a dream of flames fueled by scorched remains that are lit to a torch and brought back upon the one who burned you.
Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.
Quote Detail
Life for both sexes--and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement--is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority-- it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney-- for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination-- over other people.
Quick Answer
What this quote page tells you
This canonical quote page keeps the full saying, the attributed author, any linked work, and the topic tags together so the quote can be cited from one stable URL.
Related Quotes
More quote cards from the same area
When life is a horror....Don't look like a ghost!
Bill suited the action to the word, getting up and leaning over the handlebars and pumping the pedals at a lunatic rate. Looking at Bill's back, which was amazingly broad for a boy of eleven-going-on-twelve, watching it work under the duffel coat, the shoulders slanting first one way and then the other as he shifted his weight from one pedal to the other, Richie suddenly became sure that they were invulnerable...they would live forever and ever.
This isn__ how things were supposed to happen. I was supposed to be me. Not this.
Blame is the creed of the disempowered.
It ain't the blows we're dealt that matter, but the ones we survive.