Tears throw a veil over our faults and allow us to accuse fate without fear or contradiction.
Italo SvevoRead
Who knows whether, if I had given up smoking, I should really have become the strong perfect man I imagined? Perhaps it was this very doubt that bound me to my vice, because life is so much pleasanter if one is able to believe in one's own latent greatness
Interpretation
What this quote means
The quote reflects on the relationship between personal vices and self-perception of greatness.
Italo Svevo explores the idea that one’s doubts and flaws might be essential to their identity and strength. The speaker ponders whether giving up smoking would have prevented the development of their character, suggesting that sometimes our struggles and vices contribute to our sense of who we are and how we perceive our potential for greatness.
Themes
StrengthVicesSelf-PerceptionGreatnessDoubt
In practice
Example use cases
During a motivational speech about overcoming challenges and self-doubt.
More from Italo Svevo
All quotes →You see things less clearly when you open your eyes too wide.
Italo SvevoRead
The fancies of wine are authentic events.
Italo SvevoRead
Everyone remembers his past with greater vividness as the present becomes more important. Dying men in their last delirium are supposed to see their whole life spread out before them.
Italo SvevoRead
Similar quotes
Being desirable means being comfortable with your own ambiguity. The most ambiguous reality is that we are flesh and spirit at the same time. Within everyone there is light and shadow, good and evil, love and hate. In order to be truthful, you must embrace your total being. A person who exhibits both positive and negative qualities, strengths and weaknesses is not flawed, but complete.
RumiRead
It tires me to talk to rich men. You expect a man of millions, the head of a great industry, to be a man worthhearing; but as a rule they don't know anything outside their own business.
Theodore RooseveltRead
Our environments shape the way we see ourselves. If you have been condemned to live in an area that is pretty evidently a rat-run, then sooner or later you're gonna come to the conclusion that you're a rat.
Alan MooreRead
Patriotism in its simplest, clearest and most indubitable signification is nothing else but a means of obtaining for the rulers their ambitions and covetous desires, and for the ruled the abdication of human dignity, reason, conscience, and a slavish enthrallment to those in power.
Leo TolstoyRead
No one is born hating another person because of the color of his skin, or his background, or his religion. People must learn to hate, and if they can learn to hate, they can be taught to love, for love comes more naturally to the human heart than its opposite.
Nelson MandelaRead
A means can be justified only by its end. But the end in its turn needs to be justified.
Leon TrotskyRead