Quotes About Comparison

Man, made after God's image, was a nobler creation than twinkling sparks in the sky, or than the larger and more useful lamp of the moon.

The meritocracy defines "community" as a mass of talented individuals competing with one another.

Everybody is comparing the oil spill to Hurricane Katrina, but the real parallel could be the Iranian hostage crisis. In the late 1970s, the hostage crisis became a symbol of America's inability to take decisive action in the face of pervasive problems. In the same way, the uncontrolled oil plume could become the objective correlative of the country's inability to govern itself.

In my view, success is earned externally by being better than other people. But character, that sort of unfakeable goodness, is earned by being better than you used to be. And it's about self-confrontation.

So if you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.

Better to have loved and lost a short person than never to have loved a tall.

Perfection' is man's ultimate illusion. It simply doesn't exist in the universe.... If you are a perfectionist, you are guaranteed to be a loser in whatever you do.

The idea that there could be beings that are to us as we are to animals is a belief in the supernatural.

You can eat a Burger for $5 or a Kobe Steak for $100. They both fill you up. The real difference is the experience.

Would you be able to recognize 'better' when you're in the mindset that life in its present form is somehow not good enough?

When you look at the results on an after-fee, after-tax basis, over reasonably long periods of time, there's almost no chance that you end up beating the index fund.

Why the constant rereading? Is it not obvious? Firstly, reading and rereading distract him from thinking about himself, from enumerating the reasons behind his self-imposed predicament, from dwelling on his endless plight. Secondly, he rereads to remind himself what truly good writing is, how it formidably contrasts with what he published. Perhaps he'll finally learn something. To apply to what? To apply to nothing.

Hoy en día vivimos sometidos a la dictadura de la felicidad de los demás. O más bien de la presunta felicidad…

Nada mejor que las vidas ajenas para no vivir la propia.

Basil Pennington suggests that the core of the false self is the belief that my value depends on what I have, what I can do and what others think of me.

Morality—like velocity—is relative. The determination of it depends on what the objects around you are doing. All one can do is measure one's position in relation to them; never can one measure one's velocity or morality in terms of absolutes.

good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

Money was no more ever "invented" than music or mathematics or jewelry. What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y. As such it is probably as old as human thought.

We suggested that the really insidious element of Rousseau's legacy is not so much the idea of the 'noble savage' as that of the 'stupid savage'. We may have got over the overt racism of most nineteenth century Europeans, or at least we think we have, bit its not unusual to find even the very sophisticated comtempary thinkers who feel its appropriate to compare 'bands' of hunter gatherers with chimps or baboons than with anyone they'd be likely to meet.

What is remarkable is that all this was done, the bodies extracted, through the very mechanisms of the human economy, premised on the principle that human lives are the ultimate value, to which nothing could possibly compare.

What we call "money" isn't a "thing" at all; it's a way of comparing things mathematically, as proportions: of saying one of X is equivalent to six of Y.

indigenous American attitudes are likely to be far closer to the reader's own than seventeenth-century European ones.

Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another. It follows that arguing about whether humans are fundamentally good or evil makes about as much sense as arguing about whether humans are fundamentally fat or thin.

It is basically a theological debate. Essentially the question is: are humans innately good or innately evil? But if you think about it, the question, framed in these terms, makes very little sense. 'Good' and 'evil' are purely human concepts. It would never occur to anyone to argue about whether a fish, or a tree, were good or evil, because 'good' and 'evil' are concepts humans made up in order to compare ourselves with one another.