James Fenimore Cooper Quotes

The French want no-one to be their superior. The English want inferiors. The Frenchman constantly raises his eyes above him with anxiety. The Englishman lowers his beneath him with satisfaction.

Men and nations cannot bear to feel inferior.

There is a kind of grandeur and respect which the meanest and most insignificant part of mankind endeavor to procure in the little circle of their friends and acquaintance. The poorest mechanic, nay, the man who lives upon common alms, gets him his set of admirers, and delights in that superiority which he enjoys over those who are in some respects beneath him. This ambition, which is natural to the soul of man, might, methinks, receive a very happy turn; and, if it were rightly directed, contribute as much to a person's advantage, as it generally does to his uneasiness and disquiet.

There is something in us, somehow, that, in the most degraded condition, we snatch at a chance to deceive ourselves into a fanciedsuperiority to others, whom we suppose lower in the scale than ourselves.

It was possible to feel superior to other people and feel like a misfit at the same time.

The only thing that sustains one through life is the consciousness of the immense inferiority of everybody else, and this is a feeling that I have always cultivated.

They hate you because you act like you're better than they are

The true pleasure of life is to live with your inferiors.

Most people seem to take pleasure in feeling superior to someone. I'm not like that, which pleases me because it makes me feel superior.

The uncouth hordes of common men are not fit to recognize duly the merits of those who eclipse their own wretchedness.

Even the most abject have a sense of superiority based on powerful though undefined merits.

Old among the young, poor among the rich, I adopt an air of indefinable superiority.

Only those beneath me can envy or hate me. I have never been envied nor hated; I am above no one. Only those above me can praise or belittle me. I have never been praised nor belittled; I am below no one.

The difference is as great between The optics seeing as the objects seen. All manners take a tincture from our own; Or come discolor'd through out passions shown; Or fancy's beam enlarges, multiplies, Contracts, inverts, and gives ten thousand dyes.

The only difference between a flower and a weed is judgement.

One is never satisfied with the portrait of a person that one knows.

I will rather suffer a thousand wrongs than offer one. I have always found that to strive with a superior is injurious; with an equal, doubtful; with an inferior, sordid and base; with any, full of unquietness.

Cowardice encroaches fast upon such as spend their lives in company of persons higher than themselves.

The defect of equality is that we desire it only with our superiors.

We have in England a curious belief in first-rate people, meaning all the people we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable second-rateness of the people we do know.

It's obviously a characteristic of human beings that we like to feel superior to others, but our problem is we are not superior

It would be hard to name a more certain sign of poor self-esteem than the need to perceive some other group as inferior.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.

One is not superior merely because one sees the world as odious.

I don't care how nice one is to you, the thing you must always remember is that almost never does he really see you as he sees himself, as he sees his own kind.