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About this quote

What does it mean?
Stevenson suggests that people often overestimate their own cowardice and righteousness.
In plain terms
People are neither as cowardly nor as good as they think.
What can you take from it?
Do not judge yourself too harshly or too highly.

Where it applies

  • personal reflection
  • moral struggle
  • self-doubt

Putting it to work

  • assess character
  • reduce self-criticism
  • practice humility

Questions to consider

  • Are you too hard on yourself?
  • Do you overestimate your goodness?

Another view

This view may encourage complacency about actual flaws.

More from Robert Louis Stevenson

  1. Youth is wholly experimental.

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  2. Nothing like a little judicious levity.

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  3. I have thus played the sedulous ape to Hazlitt, to Lamb, to Wordsworth, to Sir Thomas Browne, to Defoe, to Hawthorne, to Montaigne, to Baudelaire and to Oberma…

    Permalink to quote #9

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