Respectfully Quoted: A Dictionary of Quotations. 1989.
NUMBER:
520
AUTHOR:
Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818–83)
QUOTATION:
To mortify and even to injure an opponent, reproach him with the very defect or vice … you feel … in yourself.
ATTRIBUTION:
IVAN TURGENEV, “The Rule of Life,” Poems in Prose, in his A Reckless Character and Other Stories, trans. Isabel F. Hapgood, p. 317 (1904).
This appeared in Time, March 5, 1951, p. 31, in a different translation: “If you desire to put your enemy in the wrong or even to damage his reputation, blame him for the very vice which you feel in yourself.”
