comparison Quotes

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

“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.”

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

“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.”

“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.”

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

“’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!’”

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.

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

“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”

“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.‘”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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.”

“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?”

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

″‘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.‘”

“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.”

″‘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!‘”

“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.‘”

“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.”

“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!”

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

“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.”

“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.”

“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.‘”

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

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

“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.”

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

“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..”

“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!’ ”

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.

“Like toddlers, toxic people base all their decisions on what they feel rather than on what is right. The thought of any consequences of their actions pale in comparison to getting what they want in the moment. Contrast this with healthy people: they think before they act and are mindful of how what they do may negatively impact themselves or others. Toxic people cannot tolerate consideration of others. When trying to have a conversation with them, they are self-referential rather than self-reflective. When you share something about yourself with such people, they immediately turn the account into a story about them. The self-referential side of toxicity turns toxic people into the greatest one-uppers, name-droppers, and liars you’ll ever come across. You cannot have a mutually beneficial conversation, where there is a natural back-and-forth flow. Sharing does not exist when communicating with toxic people. Of course, healthy flawed people sometimes do some of the same things that toxic people do. The difference, however, between ordinary and toxic lies is in the subtleness, persistence, and consistency of a toxic person’s behaviors.”

“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.”

″...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.”

“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!”

For, Hester, his spirit lacked the strength that could have borne up, as thine has, beneath a burden like thy scarlet letter. O, I could reveal a goodly secret! But enough!

“Jo, your stories are works of Shakespeare compared to half the rubbish that is published every day.”

“You know as well as I that it does make a difference with nearly everyone, so don’ t ruffle up like a dear, motherly hen, when your chickens get pecked by smarter birds. The ugly duckling turned out a swan, you know.”

I had often watched a large dog of ours eating his food; and I now noticed a decided similarity between the dog’s way of eating, and the man’s. The man took strong sharp sudden bites, just like the dog. He swallowed, or rather snapped up, every mouthful, too soon and too fast; and he looked sideways here and there while he ate, as if he thought there was danger in every direction of somebody’s coming to take the pie away. He was altogether too unsettled in his mind over it, to appreciate it comfortably I thought, or to have anybody to dine with him, without making a chop with his jaws at the visitor. In all of which particulars he was very like the dog.

If he loved with all the powers of his puny being, he couldn’t love as much in eighty years as I could in a day.

“Well! after such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!”

“Yes, there is something in me hateful, repulsive,” thought Levin, as he came away from the Shtcherbatskys’, and walked in the direction of his brother’s lodgings. “And I don’t get on with other people. Pride, they say. No, I have no pride. If I had any pride, I should not have put myself in such a position.” And he pictured to himself Vronsky, happy, good-natured, clever, and self-possessed, certainly never placed in the awful position in which he had been that evening. “Yes, she was bound to choose him. So it had to be, and I cannot complain of anyone or anything. I am myself to blame. What right had I to imagine she would care to join her life to mine? Who am I and what am I? A nobody, not wanted by anyone, nor of use to anybody.”

All the faces turned to Darya Alexandrovna looked to her healthy and happy, making her envious of their enjoyment of life. “They’re all living, they’re all enjoying life,” Darya Alexandrovna still mused when she had passed the peasant women and was driving uphill again at a trot, seated comfortably on the soft springs of the old carriage, “while I, let out, as it were from prison, from the world of worries that fret me to death, am only looking about me now for an instant. They all live; those peasant women and my sister Natalia and Varenka and Anna, whom I am going to see—all, but not I.”