War & Peace Quote by Robert Browning

Refusing to flinch is Browning's version of sainthood: a stubborn, almost muscular optimism that treats history as something you can outwalk. The lines come from "Epilogue" to Asolando, published the year he died, and they read like a self-written epitaph - not pious, but defiant. The syntax marches the way the subject does: clause after clause, breathless and forward-driving, as if hesitation itself would be a betrayal. Even the repeated "never" feels less like moral purity than a deliberate discipline, a training regimen for the spirit.

Browning isn't promising that the world is fair; he's insisting that fairness is a practice. "Though right were worsted" concedes what every grown person knows - good arguments lose, good people get crushed - and then refuses to grant that loss the final word. The subtext is Victorian, yes, but not the smug empire-at-its-height variety. This is late-Browning, looking back across personal grief and public upheaval, trying to salvage a usable faith without lying about the evidence.

The masterstroke is the escalation of verbs: fall to rise, baffled to fight better, sleep to wake. Failure becomes instruction, not verdict. It's also a subtle rebuke to cynicism: the posture of "breast forward" isn't naive, it's chosen. Browning makes optimism sound like courage under cross-examination - not a mood, a stance you keep when clouds don't cooperate.