Peoples, be peoples and others will respect you. Be courtiers and others will scorn you and it will be well deserved.
Wilkie Collins was a rival and competitor of Dickens. His novel Moonstone sold more copies at the time than Dickens' last two books. But that meant nothing in the long run. Right now, to be honest, Wilkie Collins is what he deserved to be back then: a footnote, an almost lost memory. And he knew he would become that.
Whatever disgrace we may have deserved, it is almost always in our power to re-establish our character.
Envy among other ingredients has a mixture of the love of justice in it. We are more angry at undeserved than at deserved good-fortune.
It's beautiful when you watch something good happen to somebody when it's well deserved.
Heaven often regulates effects by their causes, and pays the wicked what they have deserved.
Looking back, it was the thing in his life that shamed him the most: the times he was purposefully, calculatingly mean to Alice. It was those moments, and there had been many of them, that indicated to him that he was not a good person. He got mad at her for many things, but it was always really for the same thing: that she possessed his love and he couldn't seem to get it back. She didn't deserve it, which was to say she deserved better
My dad was an absentee dad, so it was always important to me that I was part of my daughter's life, and she deserved two parents, which is part of the rationale behind us staying married for 30 years.
