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?
Television has made dictatorship impossible but democracy unbearable.
I want atheism to be true and am made uneasy by the fact that some of the most intelligent and well-informed people I know are religious believers. It isn't just that I don't believe in God and, naturally, I hope that I'm right in my belief. It's that I hope there is no God! I don't want there to be a God; I don't want the universe to be like that.
The existence of any evil anywhere at any time absolutely ruins a total optimism.
The river of truth is always splitting up into arms that reunite. Islanded between them, the inhabitants argue for a lifetime as to which is the mainstream.
The inviolability of the person which is a reflection of the absolute inviolability of God, finds its primary and fundamental expression in the inviolability of human life. Above all, the common outcry, which is justly made on behalf of human rights-for example, the right to health, to home, to work, to family, to culture- is false and illusory if the right to life, the most basic and fundamental right and the condition for all other personal rights, is not defended with maximum determination.
If the awareness of our limitations begins to limit or to dim our value consciousness as well—as happens, for instance, in old age with regard to the values of youth—then we have already started the movement of devaluation which will end with the defamation of the world and all its values. Only a timely act of resignation can deliver us from this tendency toward self-delusion.
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