George Saunders Quotes

We measure the excellency of other men by some excellency we conceive to be in ourselves.

People in the world pay little heed to reason where their own interests are involved.

We all give ourselves a lot of leeway, but we want consistency from other people.

For many activities, people cannot rely solely on themselves in evaluating their ability level because such judgments require inferences from probabilistic indicants of talent about which they may have limited knowledge. Self-appraisals are, therefore, partly based on the opinions of others who presumably possess evaluative competence

Most people think everybody feels about them much more violently than they actually do; they think other people's opinions of them swing through great arcs of approval or disapproval.

I'm really good at judging and observing other people, but not myself.

Maybe other people's ideas of us are truer than our own.

I know some real intellectual people who might laugh, very close friends who might laugh when I'm said to be an intellectual.

We do not actually know other people; we only know our judgments.

She was one of those people who said I don't know anything about music, but I know what I like.

Our opinion of others is not so variable as our opinion of ourselves.

If you kept changing the way people saw the world, you ended up changing the way you saw yourself.

We have to recognize that it is a very, very painful thing for people to be exposed to their social community, to be exposed in the world, as not what they would have wanted to be seen as. This is very painful and difficult for people.

Most people are subjective toward themselves and objective toward all others, frightfully objective sometimes--but the task is precisely to be objective toward oneself and subjective toward all others.

Every person thinks his own intellect perfect, and his own child handsome.

It never ceases to amaze me: we all love ourselves more than other people, but care more about their opinions than our own.

Most of us are experts at solving other people's problems, but we generally solve them in terms of our own and the advice we give is seldom for other people but for ourselves.

We find it hard to apply the knowledge of ourselves to our judgment of others. The fact that we are never of one kind, that we never love without reservations and never hate with all our being cannot prevent us from seeing others as wholly black or white.

I am embarrassed to admit what drew me to psychology. I didn't want to go to medical school. I was getting good grades in psychology and I was charismatic and people in the psychology department liked me. It was as low a level as that.

We tell specific stories about ourselves to ourselves and we're all the heroes of our own lives. But you live through certain experiences with other people, and sometimes they have very different takes on what happened.

Very few people love others for what they are; rather, they love what they lend them, their own selves, their own idea of them.

It is only natural, of course, that each man should think his own opinions best: the crow loves his fledgling, and the ape his cub.

We ought at least, from prudence, never to speak of ourselves, because that is a subject on which we may be sure that other people's views are never in accordance with our own.

Most people enjoy the sight of their own handwriting as they enjoy the smell of their own farts.

Furthermore, what profit was it to me that I, rascally slave of selfish ambitions that I was, read and understood by myself as many books as I could get concerning the so-called liberal arts?...I had turned my back to the light and my face to the things it illuminated, and so no light played upon my own face, or on the eyes that perceived them.