It is in vain to hope to please all alike. Let a man stand with his face in what direction he will he must necessarily turn his back on one half of the world.
~ George Dennison Prentice
Modern dancers give a sinister portent about our times. The dancers don't even look at one another. They are just a lot of isolated individuals jiggling in a kind of self-hypnosis and dancing with others only to remind themselves that we are not completely alone in this world.
~ Agnes De Mille
One kind word can warm three winter months.
~ Japanese Saying
The easiest kind of relationship for me is with 10 000 people. The hardest is with one.
~ Joan Baez
The opinions which we hold of one another our relations with friends and kinsfolk are in no sense permanent save in appearance but are as eternally fluid as the sea itself.
~ Marcel Proust
The ultimate indignity is to be given a bedpan by a stranger who calls you by your first name.
~ Maggie Kuhn
There is no society or conversation to be kept up in the world without good nature or something which must bear its appearance and supply its place. For this reason mankind have been forced to invent a kind of artificial humanity which is what we express by the word Good Breeding.
~ Joseph Addison
When the man is at home his standing in society is well known and quietly taken but when he is abroad it is problematical and is dependent on the success of his manners.
~ Ralph Waldo Emerson
When you live next to the cemetery you cannot weep for everyone.
~ Old Saying
Almost all of our relationships begin and most of them continue as forms of mutual exploitation a mental or physical barter to be terminated when one or both parties run out of goods.
~ W. H. Auden
When you meet anyone in the flesh you realize immediately that he is a human being and not a sort of caricature embodying certain ideas. It is partly for this reason that I don't mix much in literary circles because I know from experience that once I have met and spoken to anyone I shall never again be able to feel any intellectual brutality towards him even when I feel I ought to - like the Labour M.P.s who get patted on the back by dukes and are lost forever more.
~ George Orwell
The wisest man I have ever known once said to me: 'Nine out of every ten people improve on acquaintance ' and I have found his words true.
~ Frank Swinnerton
I am a part of all that I have met.
~ Lord Tennyson
At the heart of our friendly or purely social relations there lurks a hostility momentarily cured but recurring in fits and starts.
The worst sin towards our fellow creatures is not to hate them but to be indifferent to them that's the essence of inhumanity.
~ George Bernard Shaw
We rarely confide in those who are better than we are.
~ Albert Camus
A sense of duty is useful in work but offensive in personal relations. People wish to be liked not be endured with patient resignation.
~ Bertrand Russell
The fact is that the possession of a highly social conscience about large-scale issues is no guarantee whatever of reasonable conduct in private relations.
~ Lewis Hastings
With three or more people there is something bold in the air: direct things get said which would frighten two people alone and conscious of each inch of their nearness to one another. To be three is to be in public - you feel safe.
~ Elizabeth Bowen
Acquaintance n: a person whom we know well enough to borrow from but not well enough to lend to.
~ Ambrose Bierce
In any relationship we feel an unconscious need to create as it were a new picture a new edition of ourselves to present to the fresh person who claims our interest for them we in a strange sense wish to and do start life anew.
~ Ann N. Bridge
Make yourself necessary to somebody.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others.
~ Erich Fromm
We accept every person in the world as that for which he gives himself out only he must give himself out for something. We can put up with the unpleasant more easily than we can endure the insignificant.
~ Goethe
Each of us keeps battened down inside himself a sort of lunatic giant -impossible socially but full-scale. It's the knockings and batterings we sometimes hear in each other that keep our intercourse from utter banality.
We wander through this life together in a semi-darkness in which none of us can distinguish exactly the features of his neighbour. Only from time to time through some experience that we have of our companion or through some remark that he passes he stands for a moment close to us as though illuminated by a flash of lightning. Then we see him as he really is.
~ Albert Schweitzer
A loving person lives in a loving world. A hostile person lives in a hostile world: everyone you meet is your mirror.
~ Ken Keyes
It is always safe to assume that people are more subtle and less sensitive than they seem.
~ Eric Hoffer
I was born modest not all over but in spots.
~ Mark Twain
A modest man is usually admired - if people ever hear of him.
~ Edgar Watson Howe
When the Quaker Penn kept his hat on in the royal presence Charles (King Charles II) politely removed his explaining that it was the custom in that place for only one person at a time to remain covered.
~ Arthur Bryant
If you treat men the way they are you never improve them. If you treat them the way you want them to be you do.
See everything: overlook a great deal: correct a little.
~ Pope John Xxiii
The more you let yourself go the less others let you go.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
A hundred times every day I remind myself that my inner and outer life depend on the labours of other men living and dead and that I must exert myself in order to give in the same measure as I have received.
~ Albert Einstein
At bottom the world isn't a joke. We only joke about it to avoid an issue with someone to let someone know that we know he's there with his questions to disarm him by seeming to have heard and done justice to his side of the standing argument.
~ Robert Frost
I reckon there's as much human nature in some folks as there is in others if not more.
~ Edward Noyes Westcott
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?
~ Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
Science may have found a cure for most evils: but it has found no remedy for the worst of them all - the apathy of human beings.
~ Helen Keller
The go-between wears out a thousand sandals.
~ Japanese Proverb