QuoteProject
Your enemies hate you more than they hate your ideas. Should you want a project to be undone propose it. Even if it were as useful as a bishop's mire it would be rejected. Once you are defeated let the humblest-looking among you sponsor it and your enemies to humble you will approve it.
Jose Rizal
ShareWTF𝕏

Interpretation

What this quote means

Enemies often oppose you more personally than they do your ideas, leading to a rejection of good proposals.

This quote by Jose Rizal emphasizes that personal animosity can influence decisions on proposals and projects. It suggests that one's adversaries might dismiss an idea simply because of their dislike for the person proposing it, rather than the merit of the idea itself. This observation highlights the importance of humility and the reality that sometimes it takes a neutral or less adversarial individual to gain acceptance for a beneficial proposal, especially after a defeat.

Themes

EnemiesIdeasHumilityRejectionProjects

In practice

Example use cases

Use this quote in a discussion about overcoming obstacles in presenting innovative ideas.

More from Jose Rizal

If the Philippines must remain under the control of Spain, they will necessarily have to be transformed in a political sense, for the course of their history and the needs of their inhabitants so require.
Jose RizalRead
I do not write for this generation. I am writing for other ages. If this could read me, they would burn my books, the work of my whole life. On the other hand, the generation which interprets these writings will be an educated generation; they will understand me and say: 'Not all were asleep in the nighttime of our grandparents.'
Jose RizalRead
It is a useless life that is not consecrated to a great ideal. It is like a stone wasted on the field without becoming a part of any edifice.
Jose RizalRead
Necessity is the most powerful divinity the world knows – it is the result of physical forces set in operation by ethical forces.
Jose RizalRead
I may be what my enemies desire me to be, yet never an accusation are they able to hurl against me which makes me blush or lower my forehead; and I hope that God will be merciful enough with me, to prevent me from committing one of those faults which would involve my family.
Jose RizalRead
To the questioning glance of love, as it flashes out and then conceals itself, speech has no reply; the smile, the kiss, the sigh answer.
Jose RizalRead

Similar quotes

Finally, I began to write about becoming an older woman and the trepidation it stirred. The small, telling "betrayals" of my body. The stalled, eerie stillness in my writing, accompanied by an ache for some unlived destiny. I wrote about the raw, unsettled feelings coursing through me, the need to divest and relocate, the urge to radically simplify and distill life into a new, unknown meaning.
Sue Monk KiddRead
Our generation is realistic, for we have come to know man as he really is. After all, man is that being who invented the gas chambers of Auschwitz; however, he is also that being who entered those gas chambers upright, with the Lord's Prayer or the Shema Yisrael on his lips.
Viktor E. FranklRead
If it be true that spirit is involved in Matter and apparent Nature is secret God, then the manifestation in the divine in himself and the realization of God within and without are the highest and most legitimate aim possible to man on earth.
Sri AurobindoRead
What I call middle-class society is any society that becomes rigidified in predetermined forms, forbidding all evolution, all gains, all progress, all discovery. I call middle-class a closed society in which life has no taste, in which the air is tainted, in which ideas and men are corrupt. And I think that a man who takes a stand against this death is in a sense a revolutionary.
Frantz FanonRead
When life is rosy, we may slide by with knowing about Jesus, with imitating him and quoting him and speaking of him. But only in suffering will we know Jesus.
Joni Eareckson TadaRead
I have always been and will be an enemy of communism, but I love all people.
Lech WalesaRead

A little wisdom, now and then

Subscribe for the occasional hand-picked quote. No noise.