"The best manner of avenging ourselves is by not resembling him who has injured us"
About this Quote
Revenge, Porter suggests, is a trapdoor: step through it and you land in the moral basement of the person who hurt you. The line doesn’t romanticize forgiveness or ask for saintly restraint. It offers something sharper and more actionable - self-definition. “Avenging” is kept in the sentence, but the method is a refusal, not a strike. The payback is psychological: deny your enemy the power to edit your character.
The subtext is a warning about mimicry. Injury invites imitation; we “answer” cruelty with cruelty because it feels like balance. Porter flips that reflex into a test of resemblance. If you adopt the offender’s tactics - pettiness, deceit, malice - you’re not restoring justice, you’re conceding that their style of being human sets the terms. Her formulation also sidesteps the brittle performance of moral purity. It’s not “be better” in a vacuum; it’s “don’t let them make you like them,” which lands closer to modern ideas of boundaries and dignity than to pious absolution.
Context matters: Porter wrote in a period when novels were moral laboratories, staging virtue under pressure and treating character as fate. In that world, reputation isn’t just social currency; it’s survival. So the line reads like pragmatic counsel from a culture obsessed with honor: the real victory is to keep your interior life from being colonized. Revenge that preserves the self is the only revenge she’s willing to endorse.
The subtext is a warning about mimicry. Injury invites imitation; we “answer” cruelty with cruelty because it feels like balance. Porter flips that reflex into a test of resemblance. If you adopt the offender’s tactics - pettiness, deceit, malice - you’re not restoring justice, you’re conceding that their style of being human sets the terms. Her formulation also sidesteps the brittle performance of moral purity. It’s not “be better” in a vacuum; it’s “don’t let them make you like them,” which lands closer to modern ideas of boundaries and dignity than to pious absolution.
Context matters: Porter wrote in a period when novels were moral laboratories, staging virtue under pressure and treating character as fate. In that world, reputation isn’t just social currency; it’s survival. So the line reads like pragmatic counsel from a culture obsessed with honor: the real victory is to keep your interior life from being colonized. Revenge that preserves the self is the only revenge she’s willing to endorse.
Quote Details
| Topic | Forgiveness |
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