Quotes About Judgment

He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus.

We cannot teach people to withhold judgment; judgments are embedded in the way we view objects. I do not see a "tree"; I see a pleasant or an ugly tree. It is not possible without great, paralyzing effort to strip these small values we attach to matters. Likewise, it is not possible to hold a situation in one's head without some element of bias. Something in our dear human nature makes us want to believe

the learning of life is about what to avoid.

Clearly, the quality of a decision cannot be solely judged based on its outcome

Men are judged, and are encouraged to judge themselves, by how well they can financially take care of others. Men are socialized to be "servants" fully as much as women; only the forms of culturally encouraged servitude are different. If a man cannot support a woman, he tends to lose stature in her eyes and in his own.

When we behave in ways that conflict with our judgment of what is appropriate, we lose face in our own eyes.

People with troubled self-esteem are often uncomfortable in the presence of those with higher self-esteem and may feel resentful and declare, "They have too much self-esteem.

we can be drawn not to the most logical explanation of our behavior but to the most damaging, to that which puts us in the worst light morally.

If self-esteem is the conviction that one's mind is competent to grasp and judge the facts of reality, and that one's person is worthy of happiness—pathological anxiety is the torment of a person who is crippled or devastated in this realm, who feels cut off from reality, alienated, powerless.

To honor the self—to honor mind, judgment, values, and convictions—is the ultimate act of courage.

I learned that the temptation to self-betrayal can sometimes be worst with those about whom we care the most. I learned that no amount of admiration for another human being can justify sacrificing one's judgment.

I was acutely conscious of the pressure to adapt and to absorb the values of the tribe--family, community, and culture. It seemed to me that what was asked was the surrender of my judgement and also my conviction that my life and what I made of it was of the highest possible value. I saw my contemporaries surrendering and losing their fire--and, sometimes in painful, lonely bewilderment, I wanted to understand why. Why was growing up equated with giving up?

It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.

Independence is reliance upon our own mind and judgment, the acceptance of intellectual responsibility for our own existence.

When the friend shows his inmost heart to his friend; the lover to his best-beloved; when man does not vainly shrink from the eye of his Creator, loathsomely treasuring up the secret of his sin; then deem me a monster, for the symbol beneath which I have lived, and die! I look around me, and, lo! on every visage a black veil!

A dead man sits on all our judgment seats; and living judges do but search out and repeat his decisions. We read in dead men's books! We laugh a dead men's jokes, and cry at dead men's pathos!

But there is an influence in the light of the morning that tends to rectify whatever errors of fancy, or even of judgment, we may have incurred during the sun's decline, or among the shadows of the night, or in the less wholesome glow of moonshine.

So, to their own unutterable torment, they go about among their fellow-creatures, looking pure as new-fallen snow, while their hearts are all speckled and spotted with iniquity of which they cannot rid themselves.

The scarlet letter was her passport into regions where other women dared not tread.

Clergymen, judges, statesmen--the wisest, calmest, holiest persons of their day--stood in the inner circle round about the gallows, loudest to applaud the work of blood, latest to confess themselves miserably deceived.

Individuals in private life, meanwhile, had quite forgiven Hester Prynne for her frailty; nay, more, they had begun to look upon the scarlet letter as the token, not of that one sin for which she had borne so long and dreary a penance, but of her many good deeds since.

They were, doubtless, good men, just and sage. But, out of the whole human family, it would not have been easy to select the same number of wise and virtuous persons, who should be less capable of sitting in judgment on an erring woman's heart, and disentangling its mesh of good and evil, than the sages of rigid aspect towards whom Hester Prynne now turned her face.

Her breast, with its badge of shame, was but the softer pillow for the head that needed one.

She perchance underwent an agony from every footstep of those that thronged to see her, as if her heart had been flung into the street for them all to spurn and trample upon.