Comparative Quotes

1. "There may be little room for the display of this supreme qualification in the retail book business, but there is room for some. Be enterprising. Get good people about you. Make your shop windows and your shops attractive. The fact that so many young men and women enter the teaching profession shows that there are still some people willing to scrape along on comparatively little money for the pleasure of following an occupation in which they delight. It is as true to-day as it was in Chaucer's time that there is a class of men who "gladly learn and gladly teach," and our college trustees and overseers and rich alumni take advantage of this and expect them to live on wages which an expert chauffeur would regard as insufficient. Any bookshop worthy of survival can offer inducements at least as great as the average school or college. Under pleasant conditions you will meet pleasant people, for the most part, whom you can teach and form whom you may learn something."
Author: A. Edward Newton

2. "The unhappy are egoistic, spiteful, unjust, cruel, and less capable of understanding each other than fools. Unhappiness does not bring people together but draws them apart, and even where one would fancy people should be united by the similarity of their sorrow, far more injustice and cruelty is generated than in comparatively placid surroundings."
Author: Anton Chekhov

3. "Bipedalism is a demanding and risky strategy. It means refashioning the pelvis into a full load-bearing instrument. To preserve the required strength, the birth canal in the female must be comparatively narrow. This has two very significant immediate consequences and one longer-term one. First, it means a lot of pain for any birthing mother and greatly increased danger of fatality to mother and baby both. Moreover, to get the baby's head through such a tight space it must be born while it's brain is still small - and while the baby, therefore, is still helpless. This means long-term infant care, which in turn implies solid male-female bonding."
Author: Bill Bryson

4. "Death duties in Harcourt's time were a comparatively modest 8 percent on estates valued at £1 million or more, but they proved to be such a reliable source of revenue, and so popular with the millions who didn't have to pay them, that they were raised again and again until by the eve of the Second World War they stood at 60 percent—a level that would make even the richest eyes water. At the same time, income taxes were raised repeatedly and other new taxes invented—the Undeveloped Land Duty, the Incremental Value Duty, the Super Tax—all of which fell disproportionately on those with a lot of land and plummy accents."
Author: Bill Bryson

5. "After crossing the Smoky Hill River, I felt comparatively safe as this was the last stream I had to cross."
Author: Buffalo Bill

6. "If . . . you are ever tempted to think that we modern Western Europeans cannot really be so very bad because we are, comparatively speaking, humane--if, in other words, you think God might be content with us on that ground--ask yourself whether you think God ought to have been content with the cruelty of past ages because they excelled in courage or chastity. You will see at once that this is an impossibility. From considering how the cruelty of our ancestors looks to us, you may get some inkling of how our softness, worldliness, and timidity would have looked to them, and hence how both must look to God."
Author: C.S. Lewis

7. "Maud: Young women are never happy.Betty: Mother, what a thing to say.Maud: Then when they're older they look back and see that comparatively speaking they were ecstatic."
Author: Caryl Churchill

8. "Belane, are you nuts?"Who knows? Insanity is comparative. Who sets the norm?"
Author: Charles Bukowski

9. "It had formerly been my endeavor to study all sides of his character: to take the bad with the good; and from the just weighing of both, to form an equitable judgment. Now I saw no bad. The sarcasm that had repelled, the harshness that had startled me once, were only like keen condiments in a choice dish: their presence was pungent, but their absence would be felt as comparatively insipid."
Author: Charlotte Brontë

10. "When we look at other people comparatively and competitively, we're not seeing them as our brothers and sisters. We're not loving them more than we love ourselves, and we we're definitely not seeing them as God sees them."
Author: Craig Groeschel

11. "Gold and silver are no doubt subject to fluctuations, from the discovery of new and more abundant mines; but such discoveries are rare, and their effects, though powerful, are limited to periods of comparatively short duration."
Author: David Ricardo

12. "In comparing therefore the value of the same commodity, at different periods of time, the consideration of the comparative skill and intensity of labour, required for that particular commodity, needs scarcely to be attended to, as it operates equally at both periods."
Author: David Ricardo

13. "People who have made comparative studies of many different societies, know that when status is ascribed, rather than achieved, individual efforts towards excellence are not directed through any form of innovation; rather, the enhancement of status occurs only through the realisation of a previously well defined role position. It is only with social change, or when some form of continual dynamic disequilibium occurs in a society, that we begin to observe the development of achievement motivation in its modern form."
Author: Dor Bahadur Bista

14. "Miss Elizabeth Mapp might have been forty, and she had taken advantage of this opportunity by being just a year or two older. Her face was of high vivid colour and was corrugated by chronic rage and curiosity; but these vivifying emotions had preserved to her an astonishing activity of mind and body, which fully accounted for the comparative adolescence with which she would have been credited anywhere except in the charming little town which she had inhabited so long. Anger and the gravest suspicions about everybody had kept her young and on the boil."
Author: E.F. Benson

15. "As for the comparatively small class of violent crimes against persons, unconnected with any idea of gain, they were almost wholly confined, even in your day, to the ignorant and bestial; and in these days, when education and good manners are not the monopoly of a few, but universal, such atrocities are scarcely ever heard of."
Author: Edward Bellamy

16. "In terms of size, mammals are an anomaly, as the vast majority of the world's existing species are snail-sized or smaller. It's almost as if, regardless of your kingdom, the smaller your size & the earlier your place on the tree of life, the more critical is your niche on Earth: snails & worms create soil, & blue-green algae create oxygen; mammals seem comparatively dispensable, the result of the random path of evolution over a luxurious amount of time."
Author: Elisabeth Tova Bailey

17. "There is a great interest in comparative religion and a desire to understand faiths other than our own and even to experiment with exotic cults."
Author: Emily Greene Balch

18. "Anyone who is too lazy to master the comparatively small glossary necessary to understand Chaucer deserves to be shut out from the reading of good books forever."
Author: Ezra Pound

19. "Look at television and how comparatively few minorities are out there."
Author: Gedde Watanabe

20. "I think our failure in the production of good town churches of distinctive character must have struck you often, as it has me, when contrasted with our comparative success in country churches."
Author: George Edmund Street

21. "Character is greater than talent, genius, fame, money, friends - there is nothing to compare with it. A man may have all these and yet remain comparatively useless - be unhappy - and die a bankrupt in soul."
Author: George Matthew Adams

22. "I am a plain man, and I care and know comparatively little about rhetoric."
Author: Gerrit Smith

23. "Q: What literary complexities do you find most interesting? That is, what do you like most to "solve," so to speak, as a novelist?A: One wishes to create characters who will speak directly to the minds of comparative literature professors and intelligent book reviewers."
Author: Gilbert Sorrentino

24. "That Rome was comparatively great and wealthy is certain."
Author: Goldwin Smith

25. "The childish and savage taste of men and women for new patterns keeps how many shaking and squinting through kaleidoscopes that they may discover the particular figure which this generation requires to-day. The manufacturers have learned that this taste is merely whimsical. Of two patterns which differ only by a few threads more or less of a particular color, the one will be sold readily, the other lie on the shelf, though it frequently happens that after the lapse of a season the latter becomes the most fashionable. Comparatively, tattooing is not the hideous custom which it is called. It is not barbarous merely because the printing is skin-deep and unalterable."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

26. "Most men, even in this comparatively free country, through mere ignorance and mistake, are so occupied with the factitious cares and superfluously coarse labors of life that its finer fruits cannot be plucked by them."
Author: Henry David Thoreau

27. "To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense."
Author: Henry Ford

28. "I then endeavoured to show that it is more especially in the thorough conformity with law which natural phenomena and natural products exhibit, and in the comparative ease with which laws can be stated, that this difference exists."
Author: Hermann Von Helmholtz

29. "Ever since Barry's funeral, Gavin had dwelled, with a sense of deep inadequacy, on the comparatively small gap that he was sure he would leave behind in his community, should he die."
Author: J.K. Rowling

30. "Every great political campaign rewrites the rules; devising a new way to win is what gives campaigns a comparative advantage against their foes."
Author: John Podhoretz

31. "Oh, misanthropy and sourness. Gary wanted to enjoy being a man of wealth and leisure, but the country was making it none too easy. All around him, millions of newly minted American millionaires were engaged in the identical pursuit of feeling extraordinary - of buying the perfect Victorian, of skiing the virgin slope, of knowing the chef personally, of locating the beach that had no footprints. There were further tens of millions of young Americans who didn't have money but were nonetheless chasing the Perfect Cool. And meanwhile the sad truth was that not everyone could be extraordinary, not everyone could be extremely cool; because whom would this leave to be ordinary? Who would perform the thankless work of being comparatively uncool?"
Author: Jonathan Franzen

32. "Heretofore there has always been in the history of the world a comparatively unoccupied land westward, into which the crowded countries of the East have poured their surplus populations."
Author: Josiah Strong

33. "I cannot think of those years without horror, loathing and heartache. I killed men in war and challenged men to duels in order to kill them. I lost at cards, consumed the labour of the peasants, sentenced them to punishments, lived loosely, and deceived people. Lying, robbery, adultery of all kinds, drunkenness, violence, murder--there was no crime I did not commit, and in spite of that people praised my conduct and my contemporaries considered and consider me to be a comparatively moral man.So I lived for ten years.During that time I began to write from vanity, covetousness, and pride. In my writings I did the same as in my life. to get fame and money, for the sake of which I wrote, it was necessary to hide the good and to display the evil. and I did so. How often in my writings I contrived to hide under the guise of indifference, or even of banter, those strivings of mine towards goodness which gave meaning to my life! And I succeeded in this and was praised."
Author: Leo Tolstoy

34. "But I find it necessary to repeat in this particular place that the division into classes, which is so salient a part of modern demonology, had, and has, little significance for primitive man or for the peasant in a comparatively low state of mental development. To such people, spirits of all kinds - fairies, the ghosts of the dead, and even witches and water-kelpies - are all creatures of the supernatural class between which he scarcely differentiates."
Author: Lewis Spence

35. "{McCabe on the influential scientist Luther Burbank}His magnificent work, which added an incalculable sum to the wealth of America and left him a comparatively poor man, is well known. His own simple account of his discoveries runs to 12 volumes and is incomplete. I was one of the few men whom he admitted to his house in Santa Rosa in the few months before he died and I found him advanced even beyond the vague Emersonian theism of his earlier years. He agreed to see me, he said, though he was tired and ill, because of his admiration of my work as a rationalist. He had just raised a storm by a public declaration that he did not believe in a future life, and his biographer Wilbur Hale repeats this."
Author: Luther Burbank

36. "It has been my face. It's got older still, or course, but less, comparatively, than it would otherwise have done. It's scored with deep, dry wrinkles, the skin is cracked. But my face hasn't collapsed, as some with fine feature have done. It's kept the same contours, but its substance has been laid waste. I have a face laid waste."
Author: Marguerite Duras

37. "Think of the magic of that foot, comparatively small, upon which your whole weight rests. It's a miracle, and the dance is a celebration of that miracle."
Author: Martha Graham

38. "One of the accusations made against the Pope is that he did not give a public and obvious denunciation of anti-Semitism during the Holocaust. It's a valid issue but one that is often discussed with too little understanding of the reality of 1940s Europe. Such explicit condemnations of Nazi anti-Semitism were not really made in London, Washington, or Moscow, but it's always assumed that Rome should somehow have been different, in spite of the fact that the Vatican was surrounded by Nazi or pro-Nazi troops and that millions of Roman Catholics lived under Nazi occupation whereas London, Washington, and even Moscow were relatively cocooned and the latter even comparatively safe."
Author: Michael Coren

39. "To grow the plants and animals that made up my meal, no pesticides found their way into any farmworker's bloodstream, no nitrogen runoff or growth hormones seeped into the watershed, no soils were poisoned, no antibiotics were squandered, no subsidy checks were written. If the high price of my all-organic meal is weighed against the comparatively low price it exacted from the larger world, as it should be, it begins to look, at least in karmic terms, like a real bargain."
Author: Michael Pollan

40. "Many people keep deploring the low level of formal education in the United states (as defined by, say, math grades). Yet these fail to realize that the new comes from here and gets imitated elsewhere. And it is not thanks to universities, which obviously claim a lot more credit than their accomplishments warrant. Like Britain in the Industrial Revolution, America's asset is, simply, risk taking and the use of optionality, this remarkable ability to engage in rational forms fo trial and error, with no comparative shame in failing again, starting again, and repeating failure."
Author: Nassim Nicholas Taleb

41. "They set off through the soft lingering light. One cuckoo in the depths of Layer Wood and one in the dense shrubbery of the Dower House were keeping up their eternal question and answer, and in the comparative coolness which had come with the evening all the scents of summer had magnified."
Author: Norah Lofts

42. "The tonic of success is a marvelous producer as well as stimulant. By the law of mental magnetism one success attracts another, and after we begin to win it is comparatively easy to keep on winning."
Author: Orison Swett Marden

43. "Colonisation is violence, and there are many ways to carry out that violence. In addition to military and administrative chiefs and a veritable army of churchmen, the Belgians dispatched scientists to Rwanda. The scientists brought scales and measuring tapes and callipers, and they went about weighing Rwandans, measuring Rwandan cranial capacities, and conducting comparative analyses of the relative protuberance of Rwandan noses. Sure enough, the scientists found what they had believed all along. Tutsis had a ‘nobler', more ‘naturally' aristocratic dimensions than the ‘coarse' and ‘bestial' Hutus. On the ‘nasal index' for instance, the median Tutsi nose was found to be about two and a half millimetres longer and nearly five millimetres narrower than the median Hutu nose."
Author: Philip Gourevitch

44. "At first everyone predicted that it would be impossible to hold these divergent people together, but aside from the skilled men, some of whom belonged to craft unions, comparatively few went back to the mills. And as a whole, the strike was conducted with little violence."
Author: Ray Stannard Baker

45. "At Harvard I was in charge of the comparative anatomy labs."
Author: Robert T. Bakker

46. "Progress however, of the best kind, is comparatively slow. Great results cannot be achieved at once; and we must be satisfied to advance in life as we walk, step by step."
Author: Samuel Smiles

47. "I never felt like I had to rebel against my convent upbringing, because it was comparatively regular."
Author: Sharon Horgan

48. "POWER is the demonstration of comparative difference of wealth & influence. HUMBLENESS is to ignore the difference, even if it is exist."
Author: Sukant Ratnakar

49. "Chief Factors Limiting Access to Facts:1)Artificial censorship2)Limitations of social contact3)Comparatively meager time in a day for paying attention to public affairs.4)Distortion arising because events have to be compressed into very short messages5)Difficulty of making a small vocabulary express a complicated world6)Fear of facing those facts which would seem to threaten the established routine of men's lives"
Author: Walter Lippmann

50. "As long as museums and universities send out expeditions to bring to light new forms of living and extinct animals and new data illustrating the interrelations of organisms and their environments, as long as anatomists desire a broad comparative basis human for anatomy, as long as even a few students feel a strong curiosity to learn about the course of evolution and relationships of animals, the old problems of taxonomy, phylogeny and evolution will gradually reassert themselves even in competition with brilliant and highly fruitful laboratory studies in cytology, genetics and physiological chemistry."
Author: William King Gregory

Comparative Quotes Pictures