We judge others by their actions but we judge ourselves by our intensions.
Interpretation
We often hold others accountable for what they do, while we excuse our own actions based on our intentions.
This quote by Ralph Waldo Emerson highlights the double standard we employ in judgment. We tend to evaluate others strictly by their actions and outcomes, while we are often forgiving of ourselves, attributing our own behaviors to our intentions rather than the results. This discrepancy points to a deep-seated bias in human nature and calls us to reflect on our own judgments and how we apply them to ourselves and others.
In practice
In a discussion about ethics, one might quote this to illustrate the difficulties in judging character.
It is plain that there is no separate essence called courage, no cup or cell in the brain, no vessel in the heart containing drops or atoms that make or give this virtue; but it is the right or healthy state of every man, when he is free to do that which is constitutional to him to do.
Few people have any next, they live from hand to mouth without a plan, and are always at the end of their line.
Men cease to interest us when we find their limitations
Tis the good reader that makes the good book; a good head cannot read amiss: in every book he finds passages which seem confidences or asides hidden from all else and unmistakeably meant for his ear.
The world belongs to the energetic.
Hast thou named all the birds without a gun?
I don't think I understood the full extent of the trauma experienced by people who churn through America's prisons until I began taking the time to listen to their stories.
There is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so.
An agnostic position is one that leaves open the question whether there exists a god or gods, professing to find such a question unanswered or unanswerable. For the atheist, the question has been answered, and in the negative.
We identify the flag with almost everything we hold dear on earth, peace, security, liberty, our family, our friends, our home. . .But when we look at our flag and behold it emblazoned with all our rights we must remember that it is equally a symbol of our duties. Every glory that we associate with it is the result of duty done.
But the big feature of human-level intelligence is not what it does when it is works but what it does when it's stuck.
You won't discover the limits of the soul, however far you go.
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