
“Everyone matters more than you except to yourself.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)
“Everyone matters more than you except to yourself.”
Ron English's Fauxlosophy: Volume 2 (2022)
“I think the reward for conformity is that everyone likes you except yourself.”
"The Science to Save Us from Science," The New York Times Magazine (19 March 1950)
1950s
Context: All who are not lunatics are agreed about certain things. That it is better to be alive than dead, better to be adequately fed than starved, better to be free than a slave. Many people desire those things only for themselves and their friends; they are quite content that their enemies should suffer. These people can only be refuted by science: Humankind has become so much one family that we cannot ensure our own prosperity except by ensuring that of everyone else. If you wish to be happy yourself, you must resign yourself to seeing others also happy.
“You cannot please everyone. You cannot soothe everyone.”
Moiraine Damodred to Rand al'Thor
(15 October 1994)
“If you try to please everyone you’ll please no one.”
“Live for yourself and you will live in vain;
Live for others, and you will live again.”
"Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool," Polemic (March 1947)
Context: Shakespeare starts by assuming that to make yourself powerless is to invite an attack. This does not mean that everyone will turn against you (Kent and the Fool stand by Lear from first to last), but in all probability someone will. If you throw away your weapons, some less scrupulous person will pick them up. If you turn the other cheek, you will get a harder blow on it than you got on the first one. This does not always happen, but it is to be expected, and you ought not to complain if it does happen. The second blow is, so to speak, part of the act of turning the other cheek. First of all, therefore, there is the vulgar, common-sense moral drawn by the Fool: "Don't relinquish power, don't give away your lands." But there is also another moral. Shakespeare never utters it in so many words, and it does not very much matter whether he was fully aware of it. It is contained in the story, which, after all, he made up, or altered to suit his purposes. It is: "Give away your lands if you want to, but don't expect to gain happiness by doing so. Probably you won't gain happiness. If you live for others, you must live for others, and not as a roundabout way of getting an advantage for yourself."
Source: https://www.academia.edu/57019490/Cornelius_Keagon_biography Academic.edu, Cornelius Keagon biography
“To love others you must first love yourself.”
Source: Love