Quotes About Comparison

Another's wife is a white swan, and ours is bitter wormwood.

All that day she felt as if she were acting in a theatre with better actors than herself, and that her bad performance was spoiling the whole affair.

He understood that feeling of Levin's so well, knew that for Levin all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class included alll the girls in the world except her, and they had all the usual human failings and were very ordinary girls; while the other class - herself alone - had no weaknesses and was superior to all humanity.

I consider jealousy to be insulting to you and degrading to me.

Toate familiile fericite se aseam?n? între ele. Fiecare familie nefericit? este nefericit? în felul ei.

If you look for perfection, you will never be satisfied.

Pierre] involuntarily started comparing these two men, so different and at the same time so similar, because of the love he had for both of them, and because both had lived and both had died.

How can he talk like that?" thought Pierre. He considered his friend a model of perfection because Prince Andrew possessed in the highest degree just the very qualities Pierre lacked, and which might be best described as strength of will.

A man could not be prevented from making himself a big wax doll, and kissing it. But if the man were to come with the doll and sit before a man in love, and begin caressing his doll as the lover caressed the woman he loved, it would be distasteful to the lover. Just such a distasteful sensation was what Mihailov felt at the sight of Vronsky's painting: he felt it both ludicrous and irritating, both pitiable and offensive.

Nekhludoff laughed as he compared himself to the ass in the fable who, while deciding which of the two bales of hay before him he should have his meal from, starved himself.

Sight-seeing, aside from the fact that everything had been seen already, could not have for him--and intelligent Russian--the inexplicable importance attached to it by the English.

She was, every time she saw him, making the picture of him in her imagination (incomparably superior, impossible in reality) fit with him as he really was

She was jealous not of any particular woman but of the decrease of his love. Not having an object for her jealousy, she was on the lookout for it.

Well, what should I have done? Counted every tree?" "Of course, they must be counted. You didn't count them, but Ryabinin did. Ryabinin's children will have means of livelihood and education, while yours maybe will not!

And it occurs to no one that to acknowledge a greatness not commensurate with the standard of right and wrong is merely to admit one's own nothingness and immeasurable meanness.

Self esteem,' said Levin, cut to the quick by his brother's words, 'is something I do not understand. If I had been told at the university that others understood integral calculus and I did not — there you have self esteem. But here one should first be convinced that one needs to have a certain ability in these matters and, chiefly, that they are all very important.

This is tantamount to saying, "My hand is weak. I cannot draw a straight line,—that is, a line which will be the shortest line between two given points,—and so, in order to make it more easy for myself, I, intending to draw a straight, will choose for my model a crooked line." The weaker my hand, the greater the need that my model should be perfect.

How many there are of them; how very many and how well fed they all look! And what clean shirts and hands they all have, and how well all their boots are polished! Who does it for them? How comfortable they all are, as compared not only with the prisoners, but even with the peasants!

The old with the old, the young with the young, the hostess by the tea table, on which there were exactly the same cakes in a silver basket as the Panins had at their soiree - everything was exactly the same as with everyone else.

She was so plain that neither of them could think of her as a rival, so they began dressing her with perfect sincerity, and with the naive and firm conviction women have that dress can make a face pretty.

Her slender bare arms and neck were not beautiful—compared to Hélène's her shoulders looked thin and her bosom undeveloped. But Hélène seemed, as it were, hardened by a varnish left by the thousands of looks that had scanned her person, while Natasha was like a girl exposed for the first time, who would have felt very much ashamed had she not been assured that this was absolutely necessary.

Stepan Arkadyich smiled. He knew so well this feeling of Levin's, knew that for him all the girls in the world were divided into two sorts: one sort was all the girls in the world except her, and these girls had all human weaknesses and were very ordinary girls; the other sort was her alone, with no weaknesses and higher than everything human.

It was that if the chief proof of the Divinity was His revelation of what is right, how is it this revelation is confined to the Christian church alone? What relation to this revelation have the beliefs of the Buddhists, Mohammedans, who preached and did good too?

for him all the girls in the world were divided into two classes: one class—all the girls in the world except her, and those girls with all sorts of human weaknesses, and very ordinary girls: the other class—she alone, having no weaknesses of any sort and higher than all humanity.