Before you embark on a journey of revenge, dig two graves.

It is commonly said that revenge is sweet, but to a calm and considerate mind, patience and forgiveness are sweeter.

Very often when people speak of justice, they are not referring to some abstract concept of law, or an ethereal vision of divine justice, but rather the more earthly idea of responding to a temporal wrong. They simply want to make sure that he who has caused suffering ends up suffering himself. The only way for the wrongdoer to know the pain that he has caused is by experiencing his own pain. That's why the seeking of revenge is an understandable human impulse, precisely because, to the revenge-seeker, the result feels like justice. It speaks to the underlying raw hurt, the primal sense that some life-altering event had taken place, and that the perpetrator must be made to feel the same sense of deprivation and loss.

The pleasure of revenge is like the pleasure of eating chalk and coals.

Very often actual revenge is beyond our means, and we are driven to indulge in prospective, circuitous, and imaginary retaliations, from thence deriving a few drops of satisfaction in the ideal form.

The very design of revenge is troublesome, and puts the spirits into an unnatural fermentation and tumult. The man that meditates it is always restless, his very soul is stung, swells and boils, is in pain and anguish, hath no ease, no enjoyment of itself, so long as this passion reigns. The execution of it may perhaps be attended with some present pleasure, but that pleasure is unreasonable and brutish, momentary and short, like a flash of lightning, which vanisheth in the twinkling of an eye.

It is useless to meet revenge with revenge: it will heal nothing.

One of the reasons why revenge is so appealing is that it contemplates some direct encounter between the victim and the offender. That in itself is an improvement over what the law provides. The legal system keeps victims and offenders apart. Step aside and the law will take over from here. But why should victims abandon the process so readily? In a civilized society, if you didn't have to surrender the job of justice to the government, and if instead you could either resolve or avenge the matter privately, would you? It's difficult to maintain trust in the law knowing what we know about its imperfections. And it's even more difficult entrusting it with something as important as bringing justice to a personal tragedy. The law isn't interested in tailoring, or personalizing, criminal remedies, or responding to our individual grief. Prosecutors don't ask victims what they would like to see happen to the offender, and then follow up on those wishes. At least with revenge, the victim is empowered by his own willingness to confront and punish on his own terms. There is no need to delegate the task to an emotionally detached assistant district attorney who shares none of the grief because he's merely doing his job.

Revenge is the naked idol of the worship of a semi-barbarous age.

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