Quotes about other
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“Love won't be tampered with, love won't go away. Push it to one side and it creeps to the other.”
Source: Ultramarathon Man: Confessions of an All-Night Runner
“The purpose of human life is to serve and to show compassion and the will to help others.”
Variant: The purpose of human life is to serve, and to show compassion and the will to help others.
Source: Rent (1996)
Source: Following the Equator: A Journey Around the World
“The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.”
Source: The Noticer: Sometimes, All a Person Needs Is a Little Perspective
“Be so busy Improving your self that you have no time to criticize others.”
16 October 1939
My Day (1935–1962)
Source: This is My Story
“Nothing so needs reforming as other people's habits.”
La gente sólo se casa cuando no tiene más remedio, por pánico o porque anda desesperada o para no perder a alguien a quien no soporta perder. Siempre hay mucha chaladura en lo que parece más convencional.
Source: Corazón tan blanco [A Heart So White] (1992), p. 121
“If I have seen further than others, it is by standing upon the shoulders of giants.”
Letter to Robert Hooke (15 February 1676) [dated as 5 February 1675 using the Julian calendar with March 25th rather than January 1st as New Years Day, equivalent to 15 February 1676 by Gregorian reckonings.] A facsimile of the original is online at The digital Library https://digitallibrary.hsp.org/index.php/Detail/objects/9792. The quotation is 7-8 lines up from the bottom of the first page. The phrase is most famous as an expression of Newton's but he was using a metaphor which in its earliest known form was attributed to Bernard of Chartres by John of Salisbury: Bernard of Chartres used to say that we [the Moderns] are like dwarves perched on the shoulders of giants [the Ancients], and thus we are able to see more and farther than the latter. And this is not at all because of the acuteness of our sight or the stature of our body, but because we are carried aloft and elevated by the magnitude of the giants. Modernized variants: If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants. If I have seen further it is only by standing on the shoulders of giants.
Variant: If I have seen further it is by standing on ye sholders of Giants.
Source: The Correspondence Of Isaac Newton
Variant: People are generally better persuaded by the reasons which they have themselves discovered than by those which have come into the mind of others.
Source: Pensees
Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter One, A. "What is 'Freedom of Criticism'?", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
Source: What Is to Be Done?
Medium Raw (2010)
Source: Medium Raw: A Bloody Valentine to the World of Food and the People Who Cook
5 December 1919
A Moment's Liberty (1990)
Source: A Writer's Diary
Context: This last week L. has been having a little temperature in the evening, due to malaria, and that due to a visit to Oxford; a place of death and decay. I'm almost alarmed to see how entirely my weight rests on his prop. And almost alarmed to see how intensely I'm specialised. My mind turned by anxiety, or other cause, from its scrutiny of blank paper, is like a lost child – wandering the house, sitting on the bottom step to cry.
“The Service you do for others is the rent you pay for your room here on Earth.”
That which is seen and that which is not seen (Ce qu'on voit et ce qu'on ne voit pas, 1850), the Introduction.
Context: In the department of economy, an act, a habit, an institution, a law, gives birth not only to an effect, but to a series of effects. Of these effects, the first only is immediate; it manifests itself simultaneously with its cause — it is seen. The others unfold in succession — they are not seen: it is well for us, if they are foreseen. Between a good and a bad economist this constitutes the whole difference: the one takes account only of the visible effect; the other takes account of both the effects which are seen and those which it is necessary to foresee. Now this difference is enormous, for it almost always happens that when the immediate consequence is favourable, the ultimate consequences are fatal, and the converse. Hence it follows that the bad economist pursues a small present good, which will be followed by a great evil to come, while the true economist pursues a great good to come, at the risk of a small present evil.
“Who knows, perhaps he doesn't care about me at all and look at the others in just the same way.”
Source: The Diary of a Young Girl
J'accuse! (1898)
Context: These military tribunals have, decidedly, a most singular idea of justice.
This is the plain truth, Mr. President, and it is terrifying. It will leave an indelible stain on your presidency. I realise that you have no power over this case, that you are limited by the Constitution and your entourage. You have, nonetheless, your duty as a man, which you will recognise and fulfill. As for myself, I have not despaired in the least, of the triumph of right. I repeat with the most vehement conviction: truth is on the march, and nothing will stop it. Today is only the beginning, for it is only today that the positions have become clear: on one side, those who are guilty, who do not want the light to shine forth, on the other, those who seek justice and who will give their lives to attain it. I said it before and I repeat it now: when truth is buried underground, it grows and it builds up so much force that the day it explodes it blasts everything with it. We shall see whether we have been setting ourselves up for the most resounding of disasters, yet to come.
Source: Your Best Life Now: 7 Steps to Living at Your Full Potential
Source: The Picture of Dorian Gray
Interviews with Betty Friedan, Janann Sherman, ed. Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2002, ISBN 1578064805, p. x.
Source: The Feminine Mystique
Source: The Outermost House: A Year of Life On The Great Beach of Cape Cod
“People think that stories are shaped by people. In fact, it's the other way around.”
Source: Witches Abroad
“Those who understand history are condemned to watch other idiots repeat it.”
“Leaders must be close enough to relate to others, but far enough ahead to motivate them.”
Source: The Postman (1985), Section 3, “Cincinnatus”, Chapter 14 (p. 267)
Variant: It is said that power corrupts, but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power.
As quoted in Values of the Wise: Humanity's Highest Aspirations (2004) by Jason Merchey, p. 120
This is very similar to the expression by Frank Herbert in Chapterhouse: Dune (1985): "All governments suffer a recurring problem: Power attracts pathological personalities. It is not that power corrupts but that it is magnetic to the corruptible. Such people have a tendency to become drunk on violence, a condition to which they are quickly addicted."
Context: It’s said that “power corrupts,” but actually it’s more true that power attracts the corruptible. The sane are usually attracted by other things than power. When they do act, they think of it as service, which has limits. The tyrant, though, seeks mastery, for which he is insatiable, implacable.
“What you react to in others, you strengthen in yourself.”
A New Earth (2005)
Joke during his 1965 campaign for Governor of California, as quoted by Leo E. Litwak in The New York Times Magazine (14 November 1965), p. 174 http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F50F13FC3B591B7A93C6A8178AD95F418685F9.
Government is like a baby. An alimentary canal with a big appetite at one end and no sense of responsibility at the other.
As quoted in The Reagan Wit (1981) by Bill Adler, p. 30
1960s
Variant: Memory takes a lot of poetic licence. It omits some details; others are exaggerated, according to the emotional value of the articles it touches, for memory is seated predominantly in the heart. The interior is therefore rather dim and poetic.
Source: The Glass Menagerie
Source: The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values, and Spiritual Growth
“When people cared about each other, they always found a way to make it work.”
Source: True Believer
“There is only one good definition of God: the freedom that allows other freedoms to exist.”
Source: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1969), Ch. 13, p. 99
“We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
As attributed in Dictionary of Quotations from Ancient and Modern English and Foreign Sources (1899) by James Wood, p. 624
“The miserable have no other medicine
But only hope.”
“Sometimes I sits and thinks. Other times I sits and drinks, but mostly I just sits.”
Source: First Third & Other Writings - Revised & Expanded Edition Together With A New Prologue
Source: The Importance of Being Earnest
“Real living is living for others.”
Variant: December is the toughest month of the year. Others are July, January, September, April, November, May, March, June, October, August, and February.
Source: Pudd'nhead Wilson
Source: Memory, Sorrow, and Thorn, The Dragonbone Chair (1988), Chapter 42, “Beneath the Uduntree” (p. 718).
Context: “Never make your home in a place,” the old man had said, too lazy in the spring warmth to do more than wag a finger. “Make a home for yourself inside your own head. You’ll find what you need to furnish it—memory, friends you can trust, love of learning, and other such things.” Morgenes had grinned. “That way it will go with you wherever you journey. You’ll never lack for a home—unless you lose your head, of course...”
Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest
Source: I Lived to Tell It All (1996, ebook 2014), Page 205.
Source: Gravity and Grace
“I don't deserve any credit for turning the other cheek as my tongue is always in it.”
Source: The Habit of Being: Letters of Flannery O'Connor
“Drawing is not what you see but what you must make others see.”
posthumous quotes, The Shop-Talk of Edgar Degas', (1961)
“All major changes are like death. You can't see to the other side until you are there.”
Source: Jurassic Park
“The simple lack of her is more to me than others' presence.”
Source: "The Unknown", line 16, cited from Collected Poems (London: Selwyn & Blount, 1920), p. 116.
“My own business always bores me to death. I prefer other people's.”
Cecil Graham, Act III
Lady Windermere's Fan (1892)
“Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.”
“For books continue each other, in spite of our habit of judging them separately.”
Source: A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas
“Resentment is like taking poison and waiting for the other person to die.”
Source: The Darkest Part of the Forest
Source: Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals/On a Supposed Right to Lie Because of Philanthropic Concerns