Quotes About Comparison

The good and the generous action of which we feel incapable is a reproach when done by another.

I feel like Bush presidencies are like "Godfather" films. You should stop at two.

The real problem with being around James was that he was always the hero. And what did that make you? Either the sidekick or the villain.

Everybody's forgiven you but you. And you are so far behind us." "You might be surprised about that.

Nothing a recovering addict likes more than a tale of how bad it had been in the old days, and how low a fellow addict had sunk. Let the one-downsmanship begin.

He's so happy," Eliot said dryly. "It's like he cooked something and it came out looking like the picture in the cookbook.

His hair—cut your fucking hair already, you're not Alan Rickman—was lank.

Quentin's scales, he couldn't help but notice in passing, were the shiny metallic blue of a bitchin' muscle car.

What was so great about magic anyway, compared to love? Seriously, what?

Fine. Better than most. But sadly for you there are many heads like it. One hundred. One thousand maybe.

thereby forfeiting the juicy solo in Peter and the Wolf (the duck's theme) to the demonstrably inferior Evelyn Oh, whose rendition of it did, appropriately enough, sound like a quacking fucking duck, as did everything that came out of Evelyn Oh's quacking fucking Oh-boe.

Everyone here was the cleverest little monkey in his or her particular tree. Except now we're all in one tree together. It can be a shock. Not enough coconuts to go round. You'll be dealing with your equals for the first time in your life, and your betters. You won't like it.

No, it was that Fillory was cruel, as cruel in its way as the real world was. There was no difference, though we all pretended there was. There was nothing fair about Fillory, just as there was nothing fair about people's fathers going to war, and their mothers going mad, and the way we among all animals were cursed with a longing for somewhere better, somewhere that never existed and never would. Fillory was no better than our world. It was just prettier.

Tutte le famiglie felici si assomigliano fra loro, ogni famiglia infelice è infelice a suo modo.

People who have found everything disappointing are surprised and pained when marriage proves no exception. Most of the complaints about ... matrimony arise not because it is worse than the rest of life, but because it is not incomparably better.

You must see that if two things are alike, then it is a further question whether the first is copied from the second, or the second from the first, or both from a third.

I believe Buddhism to be a simplification of Hinduism and Islam to be a simplification of Xianity.

Ambition! We must be careful what we mean by it. If it means the desire to get ahead of other people -- which is what I think it does mean -- then it is bad. If it means simply wanting to do a thing well, then it is good. It isn't wrong for an actor to want to act his part as well as it can possibly be acted, but the wish to have his name in bigger type than the other actors is a bad one.

My argument against God was that the universe seemed so cruel and unjust. But how had I got this idea of just and unjust? A man does not call a line crooked unless he has some idea of a straight line. What was I comparing this universe with when I called it unjust?

Roy Dale suspected that Mississippi was beautiful. He wasn't sure. He didn't have anything to compare it to. He hadn't even ever been out of the Delta.

As long as we keep comparing ourselves to a younger, better self (who may have been better only in hindsight), we shortchange the possibilities for becoming an older, wiser one. The wisdom of Adaptation begins in the willingness to let go of who we used to be and embrace who we are now.

But there was a deeper lesson: Why should we see our life as broken at all? The very notion of "fixing" may itself be the problem. At the root of every discouragement is a comparison: things should be different, things could be different, and because they are

Nature hasn't gone anywhere. It is all around us, all the planets, galaxies and so on. We are nothing in comparison.

Few of us can stand prosperity. Another man's, I mean.