Quotes About Comparison

I am by far your superior, but my notorious modesty prevents me from saying so.

Don't confuse fame with success. Madonna is one; Helen Keller is the other.

When you look like your passport photo, it's time to go home.

The grass is always greener on the other side.

I don't think women outlive men, Doctor. It only seems longer.

Before you try to keep up wiht the Joneses, be sure they're not trying to keep up with you.

An animal who gets his feeling of worth symbolically has to minutely compare himself to those around him, to make sure he doesn't come off second-best.

Cheer up,' I said. 'All countries look just like the moving pictures.

I'm not going to get into the ring with Tolstoy.

Mice: But reading all the good writers might discourage you. Y.C.: Then you ought to be discouraged.

Anything was better than Ezra learning to play the bassoon...

The dentuso is cruel and able and strong and intelligent. But I was more intelligent than he was. Perhaps not, he thought. Perhaps I was only better armed.

Man is not much beside the great birds and beasts. Still I would rather be that beast down there in the darkness of the sea.

I don't like to write like God. It is only because you never do it, though, that the critics think you can't do it.

Churchill drank twice what I did if you could believe the accounts and he had just been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. I was simply trying to step up my drinking to a reasonable amount when I might win the Prize myself; who knows?

What hast thou against the onion? The odor. Nothing more. Otherwise it is like the rose.

Tal vez, lejos de París, podría escribir sobre París tal como en París era capaz de escribir sobre Michigan.

Non c'è nulla di nobile nell'essere superiore a qualcun altro. La vera nobiltà consiste nell'essere superiore a chi eravamo ieri.

It was like mentioning one general favourably to another general. You could always mention a general, though, that the general you were talking to had beaten. The general you were talking to would praise the beaten general greatly and go happily into detail on how he had beaten him.

Mansfield was like near-beer. It was better to drink water.

There is nothing noble about being superior to your fellow man; true nobility is being superior to your former self.

Tu sais, Papa, que les femmes pleurent comme les enfants pissent?

The war seemed as far away as the football games of someone else's college.

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is—is nothing, yet at the same time is one with everything. DAG HAMMARSKJÖLD