Quotes About Comparison

He felt justified to show that "he fared well relative to the industry.

jealousy is to be found within the same art, talent, and condition.*10

I recall how we were taught in school how far more civilized and wiser we were than those in the Balkan communities

How was your year?" brings them a small but containable spasm of pain deep inside, since almost all of their years will seem wasted to someone looking at their life from the outside.

10 million earned through Russian roulette does not have the same value as $10 million earned through the diligent and artful practice of dentistry.

So we are a little better than animals, after all—but perhaps not by much.

To value a person consider the difference between how he or she was impressive at the first encounter and the most recent one.

We use reference points in our heads, say sales projections, and start building beliefs around them because less mental effort is needed to compare an idea to a reference point than to evaluate it in the absolute (System 1 at work!). We cannot work without a point of reference.

Aside from the misperception of one's performance, there is a social treadmill effect: You get rich, move to rich neighborhoods, then become poor again. To that add the psychological treadmill effect; you get used to wealth and revert to a set point of satisfaction. This problem of some people never really getting to feel satisfied by wealth (beyond a given point) has been the subject of technical discussions on happiness.

than others at whatever we do for a living. Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers; 84 percent of Frenchmen feel that their lovemaking abilities put them in the top half of French lovers.

looks half my age though he is only slightly younger than I

Never compare a multiplicative, systemic, and fat-tailed risk to a non-multiplicative, idiosyncratic, and thin-tailed one.

Ninety-four percent of Swedes believe that their driving skills put them in the top 50 percent of Swedish drivers;

it is easier for your brain to detect differences rather than absolutes

The neglect of silent evidence is endemic to the way we study comparative talent, particularly in activities that are plagued with winner-take-all attributes. We may enjoy what we see, but there is no point reading too much into success stories because we do not see the full picture.

My son, I am very disappointed in you," he said. "I never hear anything wrong said about you. You have proven yourself incapable of generating envy.

and no less intellectual than Nero.

Wealthy' is meaningless and has no robust absolute measure; use instead the subtractive measure 'unwealth,' that is, the difference, at any point in time, between what you have and what you would like to have.

Just like the income of the driver compared to that of bank employee.

He looked solid, like an oar, whereas Jesse—well, she decided, Jesse was like water: thin, and quick.

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.

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

Man's finest workmanship, the closer you observe it, the more imperfections it shows; as in a piece of polished steel a microscope will discover a rough surface. Whereas, what may look coarse and rough in Nature's workmanship will show an infinitely minute perfection, the closer you look into it. The reason of the minute superiority of Nature's work over man's is, that the former works from the innermost germ, while the latter works merely superficially.

her hull might be compared to a fat man on the short end of a lopsided seesaw