Quotes About Comparison

I often wonder whether a frumpy old woman can ever be quite fair in her estimate of a young and lovely one.

If the grain were separated from the chaff which fills the Works of our National Poets, what is truly valuable would be to what is useless in the proportion of a mole-hill to a mountain.

I like to read great books not because I'm hoping to imitate them but because I want to remind myself how good you have to be to be any good at all. We won't be read in the light of other writers in our zip code or decade but as we compare to Proust, Joyce, and Nabokov. History has set the bar very high, and one must jump over it, not do the limbo under it.

And within her something was screaming: "Oh, my God! Oh, my God! He knows French. And those girls that can row and everything. And me, I don't know anything. Oh, God, what'll I do?

Parrots, tortoises and redwoods live a longer life than men do; Men a longer life than dogs do; Dogs a longer life than love does.

Some things are Dark Some things are dark --- or think they are. But, in comparison to me, All things are light enough to see In any place, at any hour. For I am Nightmare: where I fly, Terror and rain stand in the sky So thick, you could not tell them from That blackness out of which you come. So much for ``where I fly'': but when I strike, and clutch in claw the brain--- Erebus, to such brain, will seem The thin blue dusk of pleasant dream.

No hay razón práctica que justifique el deseo de independizarse de España. Comparativamente, y pese a todo, España no es un mal país. Podría ser mejor, pero dudo de que Cataluña, librada a sus fuerzas, se convirtiera en el paraíso que anuncian los partidarios de la nueva República.

Era curiosa la forma como había adoptado el dolor que sentía. Había tenido tanto tiempo para prepararme para esa noticia, que más se me iba el alma en comparar lo que sentía con mis especulaciones previas que sentir ese dolor liso y llano de haber perdido a mi amigo.

The consolation of reading biography: Most great men have led lives even more miserable than our own.

If Attila the Hun were alive today, he'd be a drama critic.

The world is a zoo

Unhappiness is best defined as the difference between our talents and our expectations.

Even supremely able and ambitious men quailed at the thought of Leibniz's powers. "When one ... compares one's own small talents with those of a Leibniz," wrote Denis Diderot, the philosopher/poet who had compiled an encyclopedia of all human knowledge, "one is tempted to throw away one's books and go die peacefully in the depths of some dark corner.

Eris, the Goddess of Discord and sister of Ares, presides over separatio. It was she who came uninvited to a marriage on Olympus and flung into the midst of the gathering an apple inscribed "to the fairest." Thus she brought about the judgment of Paris. Comparisons are odious and comparison is what the golden apple provoked. To determine what is "more" and what is "most" requires and leads to judgments.

No matter how slow you go, you are still lapping everybody on the couch.

Oliver Wendell Holmes once attended a meeting in which he was the shortest man present. "Dr. Holmes," quipped a friend, "I should think you'd feel rather small among us big fellows." "I do," retorted Holmes, "I feel like a dime among a lot of pennies."

Isn't it interesting how the sounds are the same for an awful nightmare and great sex?

The codfish lays ten thousand eggs,The homely hen lays one.The codfish never cacklesTo tell you what she's done.And so we scorn the codfish,While the humble hen we prize,Which only goes to show youThat it pays to advertise.

A girl without freckles is like a night without stars.

These are my new shoes. They're good shoes. They won't make you rich like me, they won't make you rebound like me, they definitely won't make you handsome like me. They'll only make you have shoes like me. That's it.

Doesn't amount to Hannah Cook

They were as fed horses in the morning: every one neighed after his neighbor's wife.

As the apple tree among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons.

Better is a poor and a wise child than an old and foolish king.