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" No, I can fancy your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, I can understand how you drink your poison one hour because you liked its flavour, and drink more the next hour to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it at all. That my own solitude and imagination are only peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed in vice, what would circumstance and surroundings have made me! Oh, I think, instead of the Pharisee’s presumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ our thanksgiving should be, ‘I thank God that I have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should forgive, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose temptations, either from their own nature or from the outer world, have been so much greater than our own. "

Ouida , Delphi Collected Works of Ouida (Illustrated) (Delphi Series Eight Book 26)


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Ouida quote : No, I can fancy your temptations, I can picture your errors and your follies, I can understand how you drink your poison one hour because you liked its flavour, and drink more the next hour to make you forget your weakness in having yielded to it at all. That my own solitude and imagination are only peopled with shapes bright and fair, I must thank Heaven and not myself. If I had been born in squalor and nursed in vice, what would circumstance and surroundings have made me! Oh, I think, instead of the Pharisee’s presumptuous ‘I thank God that I am holier than he,’ our thanksgiving should be, ‘I thank God that I have so little opportunity to do evil!’ and we should forgive, as we wish to be forgiven ourselves, those whose temptations, either from their own nature or from the outer world, have been so much greater than our own.