Life's Pleasures Quote by Friedrich Schiller

Schiller writes revenge like a parasite with a refined palate: it survives only by consuming what should have been life. “Barren” is the key insult. Revenge doesn’t just fail to create anything good; it’s sterile, incapable of producing meaning, repair, or even stable satisfaction. In a single word, Schiller flips the usual fantasy of vengeance as restoration and recasts it as an anti-fertility force, a moral dead end that can’t bear fruit.

Then he sharpens the blade with a grotesque metaphor: revenge as “food” that “feeds on” itself. The hunger is self-perpetuating. Once you accept revenge as nourishment, you’re condemned to keep eating the same poisoned meal, because it offers no real fullness. The phrase “dreadful food” carries a theatrical chill: the body participates, the appetite feels real, but the meal is spiritually corrupt. Schiller, the dramatist, understands that revenge operates less like an argument than like an addiction.

“Delight is murder” is deliberately blunt, almost prosecutorial. It strips away the euphemisms that let avengers imagine they’re merely balancing scales. Schiller’s subtext is that revenge isn’t justice’s rough cousin; it’s an aesthetic thrill dressed up as ethics. The final turn, “its end is despair,” lands as consequence rather than sermon. Even if revenge “works,” it leaves the avenger with a hollow victory: a world reduced, a self reduced, and no onward story to live inside.

In the context of late-18th-century German drama, where passion and moral choice collide onstage, Schiller isn’t warning against anger; he’s diagnosing revenge as a plot that consumes its protagonist.