Justice & Law Quote by Vittorio Alfieri

Alfieri’s line doesn’t flatter human fallibility so much as put it on trial. “To err is human” is the familiar soft landing, the phrase that usually clears space for forgiveness. Then he snaps the trap shut: error is common, yes, but contrition is the real dividing line. The moral universe here is not organized around sin versus purity; it’s organized around self-knowledge. You don’t become “virtuous” by never committing harm, but by being capable of feeling its weight without bargaining it away.

As a dramatist, Alfieri is writing with stage logic: character is revealed after the deed. Crime is almost beside the point; what matters is the inner recoil, the moment when someone recognizes they have violated something bigger than appetite or convenience. Contrition becomes a kind of moral literacy. The wicked aren’t defined by their acts alone but by their refusal to be claimed by them - the emotional evasions, the rationalizations, the shrug that turns wrongdoing into mere “mistakes.”

In the late Enlightenment air Alfieri breathed, aristocratic privilege and political coercion were increasingly questioned, and “virtue” was being recast as a civic and psychological capacity rather than a badge of birth. This sentence reads like an argument for responsibility in an age learning to mistrust inherited innocence. It’s also a quiet warning: a society that normalizes harm can still be judged by whether it has kept the muscle of remorse. When contrition disappears, wickedness stops looking like villainy and starts looking like routine.