Daily Inspiration Quote by Pierre Corneille

Corneille’s line snaps like a stage direction aimed at the audience’s gut: if vengeance is truly “just,” it stops looking like a public spectacle of pain. The phrasing is slyly paradoxical. Vengeance is usually the private emotion that piggybacks on the state’s right to punish, a way to dress rage in legal clothing. Corneille cuts that costume off. He suggests that the moment you reach for punishment, you’ve already drifted from justice into theatre.

That’s a loaded move for a 17th-century dramatist working in a France obsessed with order, honor, and sovereign authority. Corneille’s tragedies revolve around characters who treat reputation like oxygen and retaliation like duty. In that world, punishment isn’t only corrective; it’s performative, a message sent to the court, the family line, the crowd. “Just vengeance,” then, is a provocation: a version of retribution purified of its need to make someone suffer, and therefore stripped of its main social function.

The subtext is moral and political at once. Corneille isn’t naïvely endorsing impunity; he’s interrogating the emotional fuel behind punishment. If your aim is restoration, balance, the re-stitching of a torn order, pain is a crude tool - effective at intimidation, lousy at repair. The line also exposes a psychological truth: punishment often satisfies the avenger more than it serves the harmed. Calling it “just” is the lie we tell ourselves to keep enjoying it.