comparison Quotes

“Instead of playing to win, I was playing not to lose. It reminds me of the story I once heard about two friends being chased by a bear, when one turned to the other and said, ‘I just realized that I don’t need to outrun the bear; I only need to outrun you.‘”

“The creature was utterly strange, not like anything they had ever known, and yet when it looked at them, some kind of recognition passed between them. ‘I know now,’ said Doon. ‘This is the world we belong in.‘”

“Relationships must be like islands, one must accept them for what they are here and now, within their limits - islands, surrounded and interrupted by the sea, and continually visited and abandoned by the tides.”

“The masses never revolt of their own accord, and they never revolt merely because they are oppressed. Indeed, so long as they are not permitted to have standards of comparison, they never even become aware that they are oppressed.”

“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”

“The air at Base Camp seemed thick and rich and voluptuously saturated with oxygen compared to the brutally thin atmosphere of the camps above.”

“He had swept it out of existence, as it seemed, without any provocation, as a boy might crush an ant hill, in the mere wantonness of power.”

“I will love you as a thief loves a gallery and as a crow loves a murder, as a cloud loves bats and as a range loves braes. I will love you as misfortune loves orphans, as fire loves innocence, and as justice loves to sit and watch while everything goes wrong.”

“I will love you as the beard loves the chin, and the crumbs love the beard, and the damp napkin loves the crumbs, and the precious document loves the dampness in the napkin, and the squinting eye of the reader loves the smudged print of the document, and the tears of sadness love the squinting eye as it misreads what is written.”

“Ladies, our judging has to stop. So does our compulsion to compete with everyone around us.”

“No; it was a big, ugly, antique, but convenient house, embodying a few features of a building still older, half replaced and half utilized, in which I had the fancy of our being almost as lost as a handful of passengers in a great drifting ship. Well, I was, strangely, at the helm!”

“We can never know what to want, because, living only one life, we can neither compare it with our previous lives nor perfect it in our lives to come.”

“I’d earned more in the past six months than both Hatsumomo and Pumpkin combined.”

“She couldn’t imagine why there was such a difference between those children and her. She couldn’t imagine why she and all these other people with her had to be treated this way. Who decided this, and what for?”

“I could be compassionate, if I wanted. Metias would be merciful. But I was never as good a person as my brother.”

“Ay me! I see the ruin of my house. The tiger now hath seized the gentle hind.”

“Light is in both the broken bottle and the diamond.”

“The glassblower knows: while in the heat of beginning, any shape is possible. Once hardened, the only way to change is to break.”

A friend is like a flower, a rose to be exact, or maybe like a brand new gate that never comes unlatched. ”

“Morality, as well as the sense of taste, is relative.”

“Is the life I am living the same as the life that wants to live in me?”

“We compare ourselves to those in the same situation as ourselves, which means that students in an elite school - except, perhaps, those at the very top of the class - are going to face the burden that they would not face in a less competitive atmosphere.”

″‘Chinese people do many things,’ she said simply. ‘Chinese people do business, do medicine, do painting. Not lazy like American people. We do torture. Best torture.‘”

“Then she began looking about, and noticed that what could be seen from the old room was quite common and uninteresting, but that all the rest was as different as possible. For instance, the pictures on the wall next the fire seemed to be all alive, and the very clock on the chimney-piece (you know you can only see the back of it in the Looking-glass) had got the face of a little old man, and grinned at her.”

“‘It is because I had so much joy that I came to have so much hate.‘”

″‘Well, in our country,’ said Alice, still panting a little, ‘you’d generally get to somewhere else – if you ran very fast for a long time as we’ve been doing.’ ‘A slow sort of country!’ said the Queen. ‘Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!‘”

“It was from the artists and poets that the pertinent answers came, and I know that panic would have broken loose had they been able to compare notes.”

“Once in the middle of the day, in the open country, just as the sun beat most fiercely against the old plated lanterns, a bared hand passed beneath the small blinds of yellow canvas, and threw out some scraps of paper that scattered in the wind, and farther off lighted like white butterflies on a field of red clover all in bloom.”

“Parents are like God because you wanna know they’re out there, and you want them to think well of you, but you really only call when you need something.”

“Stay in your own lane. Comparison kills creativity and joy.”

“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

“Man is the only creature that consumes without producing. He does not give milk, he does not lay eggs, he is too weak to pull the plough, he cannot run fast enough to catch rabbits. Yet he is lord of all the animals. He sets them to work, he gives back to them the bare minimum that will prevent them from starving, and the rest he keeps for himself.”

“’Why, we are just the same — I am only a little girl like you. It’s just an accident that I am not you, and you are not me!’”

Undoubtedly, philosophers are in the right when they tell us that nothing is great or little otherwise than by comparison.

This made me reflect, how vain an attempt it is for a man to endeavor to do himself honor among those who are out of all degree of equality or comparison with him.

“Even a feeble-minded man wants to be like other men.”

“RULE 4: Compare yourself to who you were yesterday, not to who someone else is today”

“Science is a way of thinking much more than it is a body of knowledge.”

“Usually when we hear or read something new, we just compare it to our own ideas. If it is the same, we accept it and say that it is correct. If it is not, we say it is incorrect. In either case, we learn nothing.”

″...it is wrong to be angry with people for not being so clever as you are yourself.”

“Again she started muttering: ‘I have lived a long time, but in all my born days I have never seen the sun give so little heat in the middle of the summer. It seems to have lost all its power, that’s a fact.”

“He hated Eric at first sight, simply because his feeble mind could only realize one idea about him, and that was the new boy’s striking contrast with his own imperfections.”

“One morning a mosquito saw an iguana drinking at a waterhole. The mosquito said, ‘Iguana, you will never believe what I saw yesterday.’ ‘Try me,’ said the iguana. The mosquito said, ‘I saw a farmer digging yams that were almost as big as I am.’ ‘What’s a mosquito compared to a yam?’ snapped the iguana grumpily. ‘I would rather be deaf than listen to such nonsense!’ ”

“For nothing, not the sun, not the rain, not even the brightest star in the darkest sky, could begin to compare to the wonder of you.”

“We can do our family members down as much as we like. But the second an outsider insults them our blood seethes. At the end of the day I don’t like him- but I love him. And I see my own failures in him.”

“Waiters! Alligators!”

The two quickly become friends, and through this friendship Prietita comes to see the vast differences between her life and that of Joaquin’s, and the challenges that come with being labeled as an illegal from across the border.

″‘What do you think is the biggest waste of time?’ ‘Comparing yourself to others,’ said the mole.”

“Nothing ever was as good these days as it had been when he was a young man. Horses could not run so fast, young men were not so brave and dashing, women were not so pretty, flowers did not grow so well, and as for dogs, if there were any decent ones left in the world, it was because they were in his own kennels.”

“God made me Small just like the fawn that sleeps inside the doe, God Gave Me Eyes to See the Woods and all who live in it..”