Quotes About Comparison

Servants don't know a good master till they have served a worse.

It is absurd to ape our betters.

The Raven And The Swan A RAVEN saw a Swan and desired to secure for himself the same beautiful plumage. Supposing that the Swan's splendid white color arose from his washing in the water in which he swam, the Raven left the altars in the neighborhood where he picked up his living, and took up residence in the lakes and pools. But cleansing his feathers as often as he would, he could not change their color, while through want of food he perished. Change of habit cannot alter Nature.

He that is discontented in one place will seldom be happy in another.

The unhappy derive comfort from the misfortunes of others.

We may often be of more consequence in our own eyes than in the eyes of our neighbors.

We may often be of more consequence in our own eyes than in the eyes of our neighbours.

I have brought it all on myself! Why could I not have been contented to labor with my companions, and not wish to be idle all the day like that useless little Lapdog!

Servants don't know a good master till they have served a worse.

And, sure, fine, I do check my phone about every two minutes, but so do a lot of people, and it's better than smoking, that's what I say. It's the new, lung-safe cigarette.

Wealth is not an absolute. It is relative to desire. Every time we yearn for something we cannot afford, we grow poorer, whatever our resources. And every time we feel satisfied with what we have, we can be counted as rich, however little we may actually possess.

What is so frightening is the extent to which we may idealize others when we have such trouble tolerating ourselves

The price we have paid for expecting to be so much more than our ancestors is a perpetual anxiety that we are far from being all we might be.

Failure is becoming someone who needs others to fail.

Blessed with riches and possibilities far beyond anything imagined by ancestors who tilled the unpredictable soil of medieval Europe, modern populations have nonetheless shown a remarkable capacity to feel that neither who they are nor what they have is quite enough.

Belittling others is no pastime for those convinced of their own standing. There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren't good enough for us.

It follows that the more people we take to be our equals and compare ourselves to, the more people there will be to envy.

We study biology, physics, movements of glaciers... Where are the classes on envy, feeling wronged, despair, bitterness...

We envy only those whom we feel ourselves to be like; we envy only members of our reference group. There are few successes more unendurable than those of our close friends.

We feel guilty for all that we have not yet read, but overlook how much better read we already are than Augustine or Dante, thereby ignoring that our problem lies squarely with our manner of absorption rather than with the extent of our consumption.

Afraid of losing her, we forget all the others. Sure of keeping her, we compare her with those others whom at once we prefer to her.

There is terror behind haughtiness. It takes a punishing impression of our own inferiority to leave others feeling that they aren't good enough for us.

Our judgement of what constitutes an appropriate limit on anything—for example, on wealth or esteem—is never arrived at independently; instead, we make such determinations by comparing our condition with that of a reference group, a set of people who we believe resemble us.

Using a single word to describe two different things suggests a disregard for the world's real diversity which bears comparison with that shown by the cliché user.