Disadvantage

“ One disadvantage it certainly has, but then it is one that it shares with all the other higher, and more absorbing pursuits. If inordinately{27} pursued, it tends to grow upon its votary, until everything else becomes subsidiary. What was originally a virtue, may thus in time come near to growing into a vice. Of this danger I am myself a proof. There have been moments—not many, nevertheless some—when I have found myself sighing for more weeds to conquer. ”

“ He had the disadvantage—unless indeed it was much more we who had it—of his having, after many changes and detachments, ceased to believe in the Schenectady resource, or to revert to it sentimentally, without his forming on the other hand, with his boys to place, any fonder presumption or preference. ”

“ You cannot take any of these persons at a greater disadvantage than before they are provided with their cue for the day. They ask with a face of dreary vacuity, 'Have you anything new?'—and on receiving an answer in the negative, have nothing further to say. ”

“ These physical disadvantages, combined with an education 'whose object was pretension, and whose principle was arrogance, made him at once a thing fearful and pitiable, at war with its species and itself, ready to crush in manhood as to sting in the cradle, and leading his overweening ambition to pursue its object by ways dark and hidden--safe from the penalty of crime, and exposed only to the obloquy which he laughed to scorn. ”

“ At these advantages he will be pleased and will seek to get the maximum of good out of each one of them. If he thinks of the disadvantages at all, it will be merely in order to find a way to diminish them and to rob them of their power to harm him. ”

“ The disadvantages which they would suffer are, on the other hand, self-evident: the power and distinction they enjoy today would disappear at once, and not a few might be deprived, also, of their present ease and comfort. ”

“ And instead of helping his mother to be miserable at the change, he began to find out all the advantages of the place; for every place has some advantages, and they are always better worth knowing than the disadvantages. ”

“ And it may be well to show that it would have been advantageous to the man himself to have done this, and disadvantageous not to have done it, and that to have done it would have been more in accordance with the rest of his life, than the not having done it, which, was owing to the fault of the other party. ”

“ But this time it seems I was mistaken.
“I take it that you are a failure in your native land,” quoth the ruler, “for those who are failures are usually ‘bored’, to use your tongue. Is it not so, thou parasite of the warm ocean land?”
“True it is, O Excelsior,” I replied, “but my failure is due not to me; it is the fault of——” Here he cut me short with an interruption:
“Those who are failures,” quoth he, “ever place the cause of their failure upon others, while those who attain success always accredit it to themselves.” ”

“ Thus a disconcerting chance or a temporary obstacle rouses no disposition to measure strength with adversity, or to cope with untoward combinations, but an angry amazement, an indignant displeasure, a sense of trespass upon one’s lawful domain of success and happiness that result in blundering egotistic self-assertion, which often fails in the clearance of the obstruction to the paths of bland and self-satisfied progress. ”

“ Into such anguish many have sunk upon some sudden diminution of their fortune, an unexpected blast of their reputation, or the loss of children or of friends. They have suffered all sensibility of pleasure to be destroyed by a single blow, have given up for ever the hopes of substituting any other object in the room of that which they lament, resigned their lives to gloom and despondency, and worn themselves out in unavailing misery. ”

“ If he failed, or barely avoided failure, perpetual anxiety ate out his heart; and if he succeeded, his success usually made him a grosser and more hopelessly self-satisfied materialist than if he had failed. ”

“ After all, each method has its advantages and its disadvantages. There are times when any one of them can be profitably used; it is clear that any one of them can be abused—can be made more or less monotonous. Perhaps we can wisely conclude that, "The best method is a variety of methods." ”

“ When we consider the positive evil caused to the disqualified half of the human race by their disqualification—first in the loss of the most inspiriting and elevating kind of personal enjoyment, and next in the weariness, disappointment, and profound dissatisfaction with life, which are so often the substitute for it ”

“ But his greatest misfortune was that all the active forces of his personality survived to the last in their full vigor, inflicting upon him the curse of an impatience which nothing could appease, of a discontent which knew no amelioration. ”

“ And this is the advantage which, after all that has happened, has accrued to me—that I am not even affected in the least by those evils in the state and the licentious conduct of the shameless, which used formerly to make me burst with indignation: for anything more abandoned than the men and the times in which we are living there cannot be. ”

“ Cursed with an ambition which would not let him rest, which ever urged him to new struggles, new extravagances, new ventures, and contrariwise cursed with a sensitiveness, a cowardice that made each step in the path of his career an added terror to his brain, each rough encounter a fresh misery, each rebuff a stinging agony. ”

“ Here at present I felt afresh—for I had felt it again and again—how my equilibrium depended on the success of my rigid will, the will to shut my eyes as tight as possible to the truth that what I had to deal with was, revoltingly, against nature. I could only get on at all by taking “nature” into my confidence and my account, by treating my monstrous ordeal as a push in a direction unusual, of course, and unpleasant, but demanding, after all, for a fair front, only another turn of the screw of ordinary human virtue. ”

“ The effects of it are, first, to diminish, in our eyes, the merit of laudable, and the demerit of blameable, actions, when they fail of their intended effects; and, secondly, to increase the feelings of merit and of demerit beyond what is due to the motives, when the actions chance to be followed by extraordinary pleasure or pain. Success enhances our estimate of all great enterprises; failure takes off the edge of our resentment of great crimes. ”

“ You have the opportunity of making one more effort to save us from degradation. You refuse to take the trouble; you prefer to drag me down into a lower rank of life. I can’t and won’t consent to that. ”

“ This man who had stirred up thoughts of failure by his talk, who in his person stood for waste—the result of neither competition nor intellectual incapacity, but of his own ineffectually—had set him thinking of the purposelessness of his life, its want of aim, of every high and right intention that once had actuated him, and which he had flung aside and trampled on in weak resentment against the tide of circumstances he had himself set loose and made no attempt to stem. ”

“ Let us hope that the refinement, falsely so called, which is only another name for vanity, laziness, and selfishness, may soon give way to the true refinement of heart and mind which considers nothing too menial which will benefit others; nothing too common that will add to the happiness of our fellow-creatures. ”

“ Unfortunately, during the twenty-five years which have recently elapsed, we have so deplorably abused many advantages, that, at present, to name them suffices to excite the most deplorable apprehensions. ”

“ I felt like anything rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse. ”

“ Are they afraid to go to such extremes? Ah, why then go in that direction at all, if only by such extremes the desired result can be obtained? It is humiliating to degrade one's-self; but is it not still more humiliating to degrade one's-self in vain? ”

“ One flogging, without the slightest stigma attaching to it, or reprimand, is the certain penalty of failure in his task. With hardihood or without it, I then had no chance, though, at all events, I acquired it, and that too, to such a degree, and I deemed the penalty so trivial, that I henceforth enjoyed a delightful sense of freedom and independence in its way. ”

“ When we turn to the page of history, and read of men visited by adversity—what do we say to those of their fellow-creatures who fall off from them on account of their misfortunes? Do we not call them little-minded, and visit them with our contempt? ”

“ Such deliberate return towards suffering is no cowardice, but a triumph over weak flesh; and the awkward strife of diffidence may often prove a greater feat of arms than the supple fence of self-possession. ”

“ It seems almost as if there were some equality among things, some balance in all possible contingencies which we are not permitted to know lest we should learn indifference to good and evil, but which is sometimes shown to us for an instant as a last aid in our last agony. ”

“ Their infernal greed and conceit, their confusion of mind, their slothfulness, their desire for discipline, their liking for monuments and display, their want of tact, all these defects needed but success for them to grow into active vice and plunge them into disaster. ”

“ There, sir, you fail, and will continue to fail, unless you work your own redemption. It is as though you had been born on a dead level—aimed point-blank at birth. You should have been born at an angle of forty-five degrees. ”

“ The main question is the danger to our undertaking itself. We had never looked at the other side, from defiant courage, or courageous defiance, call it what you will—carried away by our enthusiasm, we thought little—or not at all—of the temper of the public. ”

“ Their own fault, perhaps—improvidence, wild habits—ignorance of the way how to treat life and deal with their fellow-men; such fault may have been mine, too. I suffer for it; no matter—I ask none to save me. ”

“ I have no hope of accomplishing any good, and nothing but humiliation can result from the experiment; but I will go. Sometimes I believe; that fate maliciously hunts up the things we most bitterly abhor, and one by one sets them down before us—labelled Duty. ”

“ To despise those who have, by their mental struggles and conflicts, brought the subject into a condition in which errour is almost out of our reach, is to be ungrateful exactly in proportion to the amount of the benefit received. ”

“ We can’t realise without an effort how completely exempt they are from the loss that has befallen us; and we feel obscurely that their air of indifference is either sheer braggadocio, or a symptom of moral insensibility. ”

“ By encouraging this kind of vanity and spite you may entirely destroy any small powers you once happened to possess, you will, besides, become a person with a grievance, and, in the long run, will be shunned even by your fellow failures. ”

“ By the consequences I do not mean what the world will think of you, but, rather, the personal results of your action—what you must suffer while you are in the world, and what you must suffer when far beyond the world. ”

“ It struggles for and seeks its own advantage directly and before all, and, by following this tendency of its own nature, it eventually profits the rest, whereas the greatest injury it could inflict on the other parts would be to suffer itself to decay and perish. ”

“ There is, indeed, no more curiously suggestive and striking proof of the chronic state of discontent, uneasiness, and discomfort, in which men lived in those good old times, than this wonderful readiness to turn any incident of sufficient interest to make a couple of score of tongues shout together, into an occasion for seeking to change for another the rider mounted on their galled shoulders, at whatsoever almost certain cost of ruin and destruction to them and theirs. ”

“ But there is something more, there are dangerous elements in your nature which are less your fault than your fate, and which must be curbed in time, before they obtain a mastery over you, and plunge you into misery. ”

“ I think it all the fault of my own blunders,—and therein I find a new terror. That one should suffer for wrong-doing is to be looked for, but if one is to be dealt with so unsparingly only for making mistakes, who knows where his position is or what to expect? ”

“ The truth is that, superior as they are to many of the ‘changes and chances of this mortal world,’ they, too, have their weak points, and vanities of their own, about which they are touchy as other people. ”

“ What of those numberless struggling creatures to whom such happy fortune could never come, who, be their aspirations and capabilities what they might, must struggle vainly, agonise, and in the end despair? ”

“ But we intend no such foolish recantation. These hardships are real enough, and serious enough. What we maintain is that evils of this kind are not necessarily inconsistent with enjoyment, and may even give to life an additional zest. ”

“ The neglected opportunities, the beckoning doors whose thresholds we have never crossed, the good that we might have done and have not done—these are as weighty to sink us as the positive sins, the opportunities for which have appealed to our worse selves. ”

“ Now it must be acknowledged to be a little hard, that an individual should be accused of failing in those very points and objects, which it has been the study of a laborious and protracted life, to vindicate and promote. ”