judgement Quotes

“It is much more difficult to judge oneself than to judge others. If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.”

“In good time he was to discover that he was mistaken about Charlotte. Underneath her rather bold and cruel exterior, she had a kind heart, and she was to prove loyal and true to the very end.”

“Just because you don’t understand something doesn’t mean that it’s nonsense.”

“Assumptions are dangerous things to make, and like all dangerous things to make — bombs, for instance, or strawberry shortcake — if you make even the tiniest mistake you can find yourself in terrible trouble.”

“In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me some advice that I’ve been turning over in my mind ever since. ‘Whenever you feel like criticizing any one,’ he told me, ‘just remember that all the people in this world haven’t had the advantages that you’ve had.’”

“Reserving judgements is a matter of infinite hope.”

“The more we diminish our own pain, or rank it compared to what others have survived, the less empathetic we are to everyone.”

“Nothing has transformed my life more than realizing that it’s a waste of time to evaluate my worthiness by weighing the reaction of the people in the stands.”

“Four legs good, two legs bad.”

“The pedigree of honey does not concern the bee; A clover, any time, to him is aristocracy.”

“Now, the Star-Belly Sneetches had bellies with stars. The Plain-Belly Sneetches had none upon thars.”

“Everyone on Earth, they’d tell us, was carrying around an unseen history, and that alone deserved some tolerance.”

“It’s remarkable how a stereotype functions as an actual trap. How many “angry black women” have been caught in the circular logic of that phrase? When you aren’t being listened to, why wouldn’t you get louder? If you’re written off as angry or emotional, doesn’t that just cause more of the same?”

“This may be the fundamental problem with caring a lot about what others think: It can put you on the established path—the my-isn’t-that-impressive path—and keep you there for a long time.”

“I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal.”

“I sometimes wonder if anyone will ever understand what I mean, if anyone will ever overlook my ingratitude and not worry about whether or not I’m Jewish and merely see me as a teenager badly in need of some good, plain fun.”

“I’ve learned one thing: you only really get to know a person after a fight. Only then can you judge their true character!”

“Yet she appeared confident in innocence and did not tremble, although gazed on and execrated by thousands, for all the kindness which her beauty might otherwise have excited was obliterated in the minds of the spectators by the imagination of the enormity she was supposed to have committed.”

“All that is gold does not glitter, Not all those who wander are lost.”

“Some say the world will end in fire, Some say in ice.”

To owe life to a malefactor . . . to be, in spite of himself, on a level with a fugitive from justice . . . to betray society in order to be true to his own conscience; that all these absurdities . . . should accumulate on himself—this is what prostrated him.

“Judgments keep us from building a stronger tribe...or from having a tribe in the first place. Our judgment prohibits us from beautiful, life-affirming friendships. Our judgment keeps us from connecting in deeper, richer ways because we’re too stuck on the surface-level assumptions we’ve made.”

“Be careful any time the only voice of advisement is your own. Your judgment is easily clouded when you’re in love.”

“Someone else’s opinion of you is none of your business.”

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

“And from her great and humble position in the family she had taken dignity and a clean calm beauty. From her position as healer, her hands had grown sure and cool and quiet; from her position as arbiter she had become as remote and faultless in judgment as a goddess. She seemed to know that if she swayed the family shook, and if she ever really deeply wavered or despaired the family would fall, the family will to function would be gone.”

“Judge with logic and reason, but comment not.”

General benevolence, but not general friendship, make a man what he ought to be.

People like us don’t go out at night cause people like them see us for what we are.

“Don’t imagine that nobody in this house can see or judge but yourself. Don’t act yourself, if you do not like it, but don’t expect to govern everybody else.”

See how elastic our prejudices grow when once love comes to bend them.

“God, if he believed in one—his conscience, if he had one—were the sole judges to whom he was answerable.”

May the judge disappear, and the philosopher continue the peaceful exploration of the sea!

″‘Then let me have the private ones.’ He leaned back, put his finger-tips together, and assumed his most impassive and judicial expression.”

“O Judgment! Thou art fled to brutish beasts, And men have lost their reason!”

“Thus human beings judge of one another, superficially, casually, throwing contempt on one another, with but little reason, and no charity.”

“One can’t judge till one’s forty; before that we’re too eager, too hard, too cruel, and in addition much too ignorant.”

Say what you like, trial by jury is a sound system.

“I wish every day could be Halloween. We could all wear masks all the time. Then we could walk around and get to know each other before we got to see what we looked like under the masks.”

“It is wisdom to recognize necessity, when all other courses have been weighed, though as folly it may appear to those who cling to false hope. Well, let folly be our cloak, a veil before the eyes of the Enemy! For he is very wise, and weighs all things to a nicety in the scales of this malice. But the only measure that he knows is desire, desire for power; and so he judges all hearts. Into his heart the thought will not enter that any will refuse it.”

“I do not judge you. The magistrate sits in your heart that judges you. I never thought you but a good man, John – only somewhat bewildered.”

“Only God can judge me.”

“God knows; and He is merciful! He hath proved his mercy, most of all, in my afflictions. By giving me this burning torture to bear upon my breast! By sending yonder dark and terrible old man, to keep the torture always at red-heat! By bringing me hither, to die this death of triumphant ignominy before the people! Had either of these agonies been wanting, I had been lost for ever! Praised be his name! His will be done!”

“They averred that the symbol was not mere scarlet cloth tinged in an earthly dyepot, but was red-hot with infernal fire, and could be seen glowing all alight whenever Hester Prynne walked abroad in the nighttime. And we must needs say it seared Hester’s bosom so deeply, that perhaps there was more truth in the rumor than our modern incredulity may be inclined to admit.”

Never hate your enemies. It affects your judgment.

“The judgment of God is on me, answered the conscience-stricken priest. It is too mighty for me to struggle with! Heaven would show mercy, rejoined Hester, hadst thou but the strength to take advantage of it.”

“At the great judgment day, whispered the minister—and, strangely enough, the sense that he was a professional teacher of truth impelled him to answer the child so. Then, and there, before the judgment seat, thy mother, and thou, and I, must stand together. But the daylight of this world shall not see our meeting!”

“The judgment of God is upon the church as never before. If today’s church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century.”

″‘She’s not real,’ Hillari said. She was sneering. ‘She’s an actress. It’s a scam.‘”

“But how do you know when the tracing looks bad enough? Which is worse, being born too early or waiting too long to deliver? ‘Judgment call.’ What a call to make. In my life, had I ever made a decision harder than choosing between a French dip and a Reuben? How could I ever learn to make, and live with, such judgment calls?”

“Ani thought perhaps it was that she cared too much. She was constantly worried about what others thought of her, and how every word she spoke could condemn her further. Ani thought how to explain that to Selia and decided that she could not. Selia’s ease with strangers and friends alike made Ani sure she would not understand.”

“No one should be entirely judged by their past.”

“Women are not meant to judge us, but to forgive us when we need forgiveness. Pardon, not punishment, is their mission.”

“JUROR #3: He’s an old man. You saw him. Half the time he was confused. How could he be positive about … anything?”

“JUROR #10: I’ve lived among them all my life. You can’t believe a word they say. You know that. I mean, they’re born liars.”

“JUROR #3: I don’t care whether I’m alone or not! I have a right.”

“JUROR #4: We’re not here to go into the reasons why slums are breeding grounds for criminals. They are. I know it.”

“JUDGE: One man is dead. The life of another is at stake. I urge you to deliberate honestly and thoughtfully. If this is a reasonable doubt - then you must bring me a verdict of ‘not guilty.‘”

“I believe that the men who will live under the new forms of society will make frequent use of their private judgment; but I am far from thinking that they will often abuse it.”

“Even god doesn’t propose to judge a man till his last days, why should you and I?”

“Judging others makes us blind, whereas love is illuminating. By judging others we blind ourselves to our own evil and to the grace which others are just as entitled to as we are.”

“There are times to teach and times not to teach. When relationships are strained and the air charged with emotion, an attempt to teach is often perceived as a form of judgment and rejection. But to take the child alone, quietly, when the relationship is good and to discuss the teaching or the value seems to have much greater impact.″

“By liberty is understood, according to the proper signification of the word, the absence of external impediments; which impediments may oft take away part of a man’s power to do what he would, but cannot hinder him from using the power left him according as his judgement and reason shall dictate to him.”

“The reaction didn’t seem to bother her. She stood there in front, her eyes saying, ‘OK, friends, here I am,’ in answer to their open-mouthed stares while Mrs. Myers fluttered about trying to figure where to put the extra desk.”

“They who have received some portion of God’s gift, these, if judged by their deeds, have from death’s bond won their release; for they embrace in their own mind, all things, things on the earth, things in the heaven, and things above the heaven - if there be aught. They who do not understand, because they possess the aid of reason only and not mind, are ignorant wherefore they have come into being and whereby, like irrational creatures, their makeup is in their feelings and their impulses, they fail in all appreciation of things which really are worth contemplation. These center all their thought upon the pleasures of the body and its appetites.”

“Some books are judged by their covers, it seems, and in my uniform I was an immediate best seller.”

“Quit being shocked when people don’t share your morality. Quit serving as judge and jury, in your own mind, of that person who just cut you off in traffic. Quit thinking you need to ‘discern’ what others’ motives are. And quit rehearsing in your mind what that other person did to you.”

“People say we have to get angry to fight injustice, but I’ve noticed that the best police officers don’t do their jobs in anger. The best soldiers don’t function out of anger. Anger does not enhance judgment.”

It’s not given to people to judge what’s right or wrong. People have eternally been mistaken and will be mistaken, and in nothing more than in what they consider right and wrong.

“Don’t try to make life a mathematics problem with yourself in the center and everything coming out equal. When you are good, bad things can still happen. And if you are bad, you can still be lucky.”

“When your good and evil clash with your neighbor’s, fights and arguments ensue and even wars break out...if there is no reality of good that is absolute, then you have lost any basis for judging. It is just language, and one might as well exchange the word good for the word evil.”

“But in the meantime, you got to remember, you can’t always judge people by the things they done. You got to judge them by what they are doing now.”

“I was just getting ready to stick my tongue out at them; but then I thought about what Miss Franny said, about war being hell, and I thought about what Gloria Dump said, about not judging them too hard. And so I just waved instead.”

“In the most general sense, talent is the sum of a person’s abilities—his or her intrinsic gifts, skills, knowledge, experience, intelligence, judgment, attitude, character, and drive. It also includes his or her ability to learn and grow.”

“So you’re waiting, even if you don’t quite know it, waiting for the moment when you realize that you really are different to them; that there are people out there, like Madame, who don’t hate you or wish you any harm, but who nevertheless shudder at the very thought of you—of how you were brought into this world and why—and who dread the idea of your hand brushing against theirs.”

“On the day of my judgment, when I stand before God, and He asks me why did I kill one of his true miracles, what am I gonna say? That it was my job? My job?”

“Prisoners at the bar, have you anything to say in your defence?”

“LaBoeuf said, ‘There is something in what she says, Cogburn. I think she has done fine myself. She has won her spurs, so to speak. That is just my personal opinion.’ ”

“It all goes to show, like Grim always says, that you can’t always judge a book by the cover.”

“‘Well, you’re horse thieves, and that’s a sin in my book,’ Call said. ‘Where do you people come from?‘”

“You can easily judge the character of a man by how he treats those who can do nothing for him.”

“Love is not simply giving; it is judicious giving and judicious withholding as well. It is judicious praising and judicious criticizing. [...] It is leadership. The word ‘judicious’ means requiring judgment, and judgment requires more than instinct; it requires thoughtful and often painful decision making.”

“It seems to be a rule of wisdom never to rely on your memory alone, scarcely even in acts of pure memory, but to bring the past for judgment into the thousand-eyed present, and live ever in a new day.”

“‘What’s the point in having a mind if you don’t use it to make judgments?’ ‘What’s the point in having a heart if you don’t use it to spare others from the harsh judgments of your mind?’”

“As soon as you concern yourself with the “good” and “bad” of your fellows, you create an opening in your heart for maliciousness to enter. Testing, competing with, and criticizing others weakens and defeats you.”

“At the man’s heels trotted a dog, a big native husky, the proper wolf dog, gray-coated and without any visible or temperamental difference from its brother the wild wolf. The animal […] knew that it was no time for traveling. Its instinct told it a truer tale than the man’s judgment.”

“I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do…Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”

“That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me, and substituted for the large and imposing figure of a gentleman, which Milton recommended for my perpetual adoration, a view of the open sky.”

“And before we judge of them too harshly we must remember what ruthless and utter destruction our own species has wrought, not only upon animals, such as the vanished bison and the dodo, but upon its inferior races.”

“I wait full knowledge ere I judge.”

“Here is what we seek: a compassion that can stand in awe at what the poor have to carry rather than stand in judgment at how they carry it.”

“I’ve seen what you can do to a jury. Twist and tangle them. Nobody’s forgotten the Endicott Publishing case—where you made the jury believe the obscenity was in their own minds, not on the printed page. It was immoral what you did to that jury. Tricking them. Judgment by confusion. Think you can get away with it here?”

“The use of this title prejudices the case of my client: it calls up a picture of the prosecution, astride a white horse, ablaze in the uniform of a militia colonel, with all the forces of right and righteousness marshaled behind him.”

“We have reached a verdict your honor. This man’s heart is deficient. He loves, but his love is worth nothing.”

“She could not have borne their pity, and their whispered remarks to one another upon her strange situation; though she would almost have faced a knowledge of her circumstances by every individual there, so long as her story had remained isolated in the mind of each. It was the interchange of ideas about her that made her sensitiveness wince.”

“You’re letting your emotions cloud your judgement, and it’s going to get you killed.”

“So many live on and want nothing And are raised to the rank of prince By the slippery ease of their light judgments But what you love to see are faces that do work and feel thirst.”

“I began to listen with my eyes, and there is no way that your eyes don’t affect your judgement. The only true way to listen is with your ears and your heart.”

“When we judge or criticize another person, it says nothing about that person; it merely says something about our own need to be critical.”

“When people like me, they like me “in spite of my color.” When they dislike me; they point out that it isn’t because of my color. Either way, I am locked in to the infernal circle.”

“Where there is no judge on earth, the appeal lies to God in heaven.”

“Mr. Eugenides, the Smyrna merchant Unshaven, with a pocket full of currants.”

“Others only delude themselves and thus upset families, churches, and all other relationships. In their self-pride and judgment of others, they show great inconsistency.”

“Mentioning the faults of others does not rid us of our own.”

″ In this world of ours none of us can afford to be lookers-on, the critics standing on the sidelines.”

“I am anti-life, the Beast of Judgment. I am the dark at the end of everything. The end of universes, gods, worlds…of everything. And what will you be then, Dreamlord?”

“Nippers…was a whiskered, sallow, and upon the whole rather piratical-looking young man of about five and twenty. I always deemed him the victim of two evil powers – ambition and indigestion.”

“A declaration of war on the masses by Higher Men is needed!... Everything that makes soft and effeminate, that serves the end of the People or the Feminine, works in favor of Universal Suffrage, i.e. the domination of the Inferior Men. But we should take reprisal and bring this whole affair to light and the bar of judgment.”

“It is not seldom the case that, when a man is browbeaten in some unprecedented and violently unreasonable way, he begins to stagger in his own plainest faith. He begins, as it were, vaguely to surmise that, wonderful as it may be, all the justice and all the reason is on the other side. Accordingly, if any disinterested persons are present, he turns to them for some reinforcement for his own faltering mind.”

“The worst offense of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.”

“The PEOPLE are the grand inquest who have a RIGHT to judge of its merits. The hideous daemon of Aristocracy has hitherto had so much influence as to bar the channels of investigation, preclude the people from inquiry and extinguish every spark of liberal information of its qualities.”

“You can often judge the character of a person by the way he treats his fellow men.”

“One of the greatest problems people have with failure is that they are too quick to judge isolated situations in their lives and label them as failures. Instead, they need to keep the bigger picture in mind.”

“This book is intended as a correlative history of the modern soul and of a new power to judge.”

“We have then a public execution and a timetable. They do not punish the same type of crimes or the same type of delinquent. But they each define a certain penal style.”

“I thought how you could never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening in their lives.”

“You’ve got to look like you’re trying to stop him, though. If you don’t then you’re a gutless wonder. A gutless wonder is about the worst thing you can be in our town. If you’re a boy that is.”

“Even though the Point was only half an hour’s drive from the Port, the two towns didn’t have much to do with one another. The footy was really the only place where Nungas and Goonyas got to hand around together.”

“Always gawking and sticking her beak over the hedge.”

“In a way, I guess I thought I didn’t really need to concern myself with this type of thing because compared to him, I don’t come across as ‘threatening,’ you know? I don’t sag my pants or wear my clothes super big. I go to a good school, and have goals and vision and ‘a great head on my shoulders,’ as Mama likes to say.”

“Everybody is waiting for the end to come, but what if it already passed us by? What if the final joke of Judgment Day was that it had already come and gone and we were none the wiser? Apocalypse arrives quietly; the chosen are herded off to heaven, and the rest of us, the ones who failed the test, just keep on going, oblivious. Dead already, wandering around long after the gods have stopped keeping score, still optimistic about the future.”

“Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgement, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such?”

“When [Albert’s father] came back into the stable afterward and began to sweet-talk me and held out a bucket of sweet-smelling oats, I was immediately suspicious. But the oats and my own inquisitiveness overcame my better judgment.”

“The inability to carve out a space in which to invent oneself without constant judgment; that is what makes me unhappy.”

″‘They don’t look like geniuses,’ Jack thought, not for the first time. ‘Just like anybody else’s brother and sisters they look.‘”

“We think we can easily see into the hearts of others based on the flimsiest of clues. We jump at the chance to judge strangers. We would never do that to ourselves, of course. We are nuanced and complex and enigmatic. But the stranger is easy.”

“My sins are running out behind me, and I do not see them, and I come to judge the sins of another!”

“She said also that they absolutely hated any assignment in which they had to interpret what they had read. If they had to think about anything, make critical judgments and deliberations, the cause was hopeless. The best they could be expected to do was regurgitate.”

“I was the same man, whether white or black. Yet when I was white, I received the brotherly-love smiles and the privileges from whites and the hate stares or obsequiousness from the Negroes. And when I was a Negro, the whites judged me fit for the junk heap, while the Negroes treated me with great warmth.”

“Research shows that the best way to deal with negativity is to observe it, without reaction and without judgment. Then consciously label each negative feeling and replace it with positive, compassionate, and solution-based thoughts. One”

“Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.”

“I have never known courage to be judged by the length of a man’s hair. Or, for the matter of that, whether he has any hair at all.”

“Reckless, foolish indulgence.”

″‘You’ll like her Kent: a very plucky little woman.’ Now they had met and Kent was not so sure. In fact he resented her already.”

“All you need are these: certainty of judgement in the present moment: action for the common good in the present moment; and an attitude of gratitude in the present moment for anything that comes your way.”

“She looks rich. Not flashy rich. The french equivalent of posh. You don’t have hair that perfect unless you spend your days basically doing nothing.”

“There’s something reckless about her- it feels as though she might do anything. Unpredictable. Dangerous. And given this morning’s outing she’s clearly got issues with the police.”

“I beg your pardon;⁠—one knows exactly what to think.”

“I wouldn’t give a dog I liked to that Blewett woman,” said Matthew with unusual vim.”

Jo led the way, and as if used to waiting on ladies, Laurie drew up a little table, brought a second installment of coffee and ice for Jo, and was so obliging that even particular Meg pronounced him a ‘nice boy’.

“One has a right to judge of a man by the effect he has over his friends. Yours seem to lose all sense of honour, of goodness, of purity. You have filled them with a madness for pleasure.”

‘Heaven forbid! Even if you were really criminal, for that can only drive you to desperation, and not instigate you to virtue. I also am unfortunate; I and my family have been condemned, although innocent; judge, therefore, if I do not feel for your misfortunes.’