How Awful Goodness Seems

Abashed the Devil stood,
And felt how awful goodness is, and saw
Virtue in her shape how lovely; saw, and pined
His loss; but cheifly to find here observed
His lustre visibly impaired; yet seemed
Undaunted:—"If I must contend," said he,
"Best with the best, the sender, not the sent,
Or all at once; more glory will be won,
Or less be lost."

" Had she been a sage and monarch in whom the most venerable hierarchy and the most illustrious dynasty converged, her pretensions and proceedings would have been as trying to the official mind as the pretensions of Caesar were to Cassius. 

As her actual condition was pure upstart, there were only two opinions about her.

One was that she was Miraculous :

The Other that she was Unbearable.

JOAN AND SOCRATES

If Joan had been malicious, selfish, cowardly, or stupid, she would have been one of the most odious persons known to history instead of one of the most attractive. 

If she had been old enough to know the effect she was producing on the men whom she humiliated by being right when they were wrong, and had learned to flatter and manage them, she might have lived as long as Queen Elizabeth. 

But she was too young and rustical and inexperienced to have any such arts. 

When she was thwarted by men whom she thought fools, she made no secret of her opinion of them or her impatience with their folly; and she was naïve enough to expect them to be obliged to her for setting them right and keeping them out of mischief. 

Now it is always hard for superior wits to understand the fury roused by their exposures of the stupidities of comparative dullards. 

Even Socrates, for all his age and experience, did not defend himself at his trial like a man who understood the long accumulated fury that had burst on him, and was clamoring for his death. 

His accuser, if born 2300 years later, might have been picked out of any first class carriage on a suburban railway during the evening or morning rush from or to the City; for he had really nothing to say except that he and his like could not endure being shewn up as idiots every time Socrates opened his mouth. 

Socrates, unconscious of this, was paralyzed by his sense that somehow he was missing the point of the attack. 

He petered out after he had established the fact that he was an old soldier and a man of honorable life, and that his accuser was a silly snob. 

He had no suspicion of the extent to which his mental superiority had roused fear and hatred against him in the hearts of men towards whom he was conscious of nothing but good will and good service. "

"I have a competition in me....
I want no one else to succeed.
I hate Most People.

There are times when I look at People and I see nothing worth liking.
I want to earn enough money that I can get away from everyone.
I see The Worst in People.
I don’t need to look past seeing them to get all I need.

I’ve built my hatreds up over the years, little by little, Henry… to have you here gives me a second breath.

I can’t keep doing this on my own with these… people."