Great Throughts Treasury

This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.

Judgment

"To believe your own thought, to believe that what is true for you in your private heart is true for all men - that is genius. Speak your latent conviction, and it shall be the universal sense; for the inmost in due time becomes the outmost, and our first thought is rendered back to us by the trumpets of the Last Judgment." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"No man has learned anything until he knows that every day is the Judgment Day." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The forgiveness of the world can only be accomplished by the judgment of the world." - Ralph Washington Sockman

"Good judgment comes from experience, and often experience comes from bad judgment." - Rita Mae Brown

"Property may be destroyed and money may lose its purchasing power; but, character, health, knowledge and good judgment will always be in demand under all conditions." - Roger Babson, fully Roger Ward Babson

"For no reason whatever should one judge the actions of creatures or their ;motives. Even when we see that it is an actual sin, we ought not to pass judgment on it, but have holy and sincere compassion and offer it up to God with humble and devout prayer." - Saint Catherine of Siena NULL

"I could never divide myself from any man upon the difference of an opinion, or be angry with his judgment for not agreeing in that from which within a few days I might dissent myself." -

"Men of mean judgment oft ignore the good that lies within their grasp, till they have lost it." - Sophocles NULL

"When man appears before the Throne of Judgment, the first question he is asked is not: “Have you believed in God? Or “Have you prayed and observed the ritual?” He is asked: “Have you dealt honorably and faithfully in all your dealings with your fellow man?”" - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"A President does not have to be a great creative or innovative thinker, as helpful as that may be. For an almost endless flow of new ideas will almost certainly come to him and his real task is to discriminate and choose among them. Similarly, he does not personally have to be a great administrator, but he has to choose and guide those who are. He has to be as discriminating in his judgment of men as of ideas." - Ted Sorensen, fully Theodore Chalkin "Ted" Sorensen

"Verily, when the day of judgment comes, we shall not be asked what we have read, but what we have done." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken

"At the day of judgment it shall not be asked of us what we have read, but what we have done; not how well we have said, but how religiously we have lived." - Thomas Kempis, aka Thomas à Kempis, Thomas von Kempen, Thomas Haemerkken or Hammerlein or Hemerken or Hämerken

"All calm inquiry conducted among those who have their main principles of judgment in common, leads, if not to an approximation of views, yet, at least, to an increase of sympathy." - Thomas Arnold

"Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death." - Thomas Carlyle

"Memory depends very much on the perspicuity, regularity, and order of our thoughts. Many complain of the want of memory, when the defect is in the judgment; and others, by grasping at all, retain nothing." - Thomas Fuller

"No nation is fit to sit in judgment upon any other nation." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"The law that will work is merely the summing up in legislative form of the moral judgment that the community has already reached." - Woodrow Wilson, fully Thomas Woodrow Wilson

"Prejudice is opinion without judgment." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"Humility is nothing else but a right judgment of ourselves." - William Law

"Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice; take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Polonius at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare

"Take each man's censure, but reserve thy judgment." - William Shakespeare

"All that glisters is not gold, often have you heard that told: many a man his life hath sold, but my outside to behold: gilded tombs do worms infold. Had you been as wise as bold, young in limbs, in judgment old, your answer had not been inscroll'd. Fare you well, your suit is cold. The Merchant of Venice. Act ii. Sc. 7." - William Shakespeare

"Give thy thoughts no tongue, nor any unproportioned thought his act. Be thou familiar, but by no means vulgar... Give every man thine ear, but few thy voice. Take each man’s censure, but reserve thy judgment... This above all: To thine own self be true; and it must follow, as the night the day. Thou canst not then be false to any man. Hamlet Prince of Denmark (Polonius at I, iii)" - William Shakespeare

"It reflects a prevailing myth that production technology is no more amenable to human judgment or social interests than the laws of thermodynamics, atomic structure or biological inheritance. " - Barry Commoner

"For the learning of every virtue there is an appropriate discipline and for the learning of suspended judgment the best discipline is philosophy. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"If the intellectual has any function in society, it is to preserve a cool and unbiased judgment in the face of all solicitations to passion... During the war, the ordinary virtues, such as thrift, industry, and public spirit, were used to swell the magnitude of the disaster by producing a greater energy in the work of mutual extermination. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Judgment is the ability to think of many matters at once, in their interdependence, their related importance, and their consequences." - C. P. Snow, fully Charles Percy "C.P." Snow

"Experts often possess more data than judgment. " - Colin Powell, fully Colin Luther Powell

"Without compassion, we will never know anyone or anything, not even our own story. Too much judgment, too many ideas and attitudes will stand in the way of the fundamental principle that we are similar to, connected with, and part of everything else." - Deena Metzger

"Every principle is a judgment, every judgment the outcome of experience, and experience is only acquired by the exercise of the senses; whence it follows that religious principles bear upon nothing whatever and are not in the slightest innate." - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"Real magic in relationships means an absence of judgment of others. " -

"All knowledge that is about human society, and not about the natural world, is historical knowledge, and therefore rests upon judgment and interpretation. This is not to say that facts or data are nonexistent, but that facts get their importance from what is made of them in interpretation… for interpretations depend very much on who the interpreter is, who he or she is addressing, what his or her purpose is, at what historical moment the interpretation takes place" - Edward Wadie Saïd

"Maintaining an attitude of playfulness may at first seem inappropriate for problem-solving, but intuitive problem-solving is basically a creative process, and is more easily activated when critical judgment is suspended." - Frances E. Vaughan

"There are and can be only two ways of searching into and discovering truth. The one flies from the senses and particulars to the most general axioms, and from these principles, the truth of which it takes for settled and immovable, proceeds to judgment and to the discovery of middle axioms. And this way is now in fashion. The other derives axioms from the senses and particulars, rising by a gradual and unbroken ascent, so that it arrives at the most general axioms last of all. This is the true way, but as yet untried." - Francis Bacon

"To spend too much time in studies is sloth; to use them too much for ornament, is affectation; to make judgment wholly by their rules, is the humor of a scholar. They perfect nature, and are perfected by experience: for natural abilities are like natural plants, that need proyning, by study; and studies themselves, do give forth directions too much at large, except they be bounded in by experience." - Francis Bacon

"Every master of slaves is born a petty tyrant. They bring the judgment of heaven on a Country. As nations can not be rewarded or punished in the next world they must be in this. By an inevitable chain of causes & effects providence punishes national sins, by national calamities." - George Mason

"A God without wrath brought human beings without sin into a kingdom without judgment through ministrations of a Christ without a cross." - Richard Niebuhr, fully Helmut Richard Niebuhr

"Judgment and love are opposites. From one comes all the sorrows of the world. From the other comes the peace of God. Judgment will bind my eyes and make me blind." - Helen Schucman, born Helen Cohn

"In self-awareness there is no need for confession, for self-awareness creates the mirror in which all things are reflected without distortion. Every thought- feeling is thrown, as it were, on the screen of awareness to be observed, studied and understood; but this flow of understanding is blocked when there is condemnation or acceptance, judgment or identification. The more the screen is watched and understood—not as a duty or enforced practice, but because pain and sorrow have created the insatiable interest that brings its own discipline—the greater the intensity of awareness, and this in turn brings heightened understanding." - Jiddu Krishnamurti

"Every judgment in science stands on the edge of error, and is personal. Science is a tribute to what we can know although we are fallible. " - Jacob Bronowski

"In this life we never behold the true state of our interior: our attention is engaged by the few serious sentiments with which we are occasionally animated; and the judgment which we form of ourselves is generally influenced by the last impressions which are made upon our minds." - Jean Baptiste Massillon

"It is a sad thing when men have neither the wit to speak well nor the judgment to hold their tongues." - Jean de La Bruyère

"In reality, the difference is, that the savage lives within himself while social man lives outside himself and can only live in the opinion of others, so that he seems to receive the feeling of his own existence only from the judgment of others concerning him. It is not to my present purpose to insist on the indifference to good and evil which arises from this disposition, in spite of our many fine works on morality, or to show how, everything being reduced to appearances, there is but art and mummery in even honor, friendship, virtue, and often vice itself, of which we at length learn the secret of boasting; to show, in short, how abject we are, and never daring to ask ourselves in the midst of so much philosophy, benevolence, politeness, and of such sublime codes of morality, we have nothing to show for ourselves but a frivolous and deceitful appearance, honor without virtue, reason without wisdom, and pleasure without happiness. " - Jean-Jacques Rousseau

"A man hath riches. Whence came they, and whither go they? for this is the way to form a judgment of the esteem which they and their possessor deserve. If they have been acquired by fraud or violence, if they make him proud and vain, if they minister to luxury and intemperance, if they are avariciously hoarded up and applied to no proper use, the possessor becomes odious and contemptible." - John Jortin

"Our duty is to believe that for which we have sufficient evidence, and to suspend our judgment when we have not. " - John Lubbock, 1st Baron Avebury, 4th Baronet, Sir John Lubbock

"Our brains are no longer conditioned for reverence and awe. We cannot imagine a Second Coming that would not be cut down to size by the televised evening news, or a Last Judgment not subject to pages of holier-than-Thou second- guessing in The New York Review of Books." - John Updike

"If our basic concepts are impregnable to analysis, then we must not be surprised that the ultimate answers are not attainable by reason alone. If it is impossible to define “goodness,” “value,” or “fact,” how should we ever succeed in defining what we mean by God? Every religious act and judgment involves the acceptance of the ineffable, the acknowledgment of the inconceivable. When the basic issues of religion, such as God, revelation, prayer, holiness, commandments, are dissolved into pedestrian categories and deprived of sublime relevance, they come close to being meaningless." - Abraham Joshua Heschel

"For of those to whom much is given, much is required. And when at some future date the high court of history sits in judgment on each of us—recording whether in our brief span of service we fulfilled our responsibilities to the state—our success or failure, in whatever office we hold, will be measured by the answers to four questions: First, were we truly men of courage—with the courage to stand up to one’s enemies—and the courage to stand up, when necessary, to one’s associates—the courage to resist public pressure, as well as private greed? Secondly, were we truly men of judgment—with perceptive judgment of the future as well as the past—of our mistakes as well as the mistakes of others—with enough wisdom to know what we did not know and enough candor to admit it? Third, were we truly men of integrity—men who never ran out on either the principles in which we believed or the men who believed in us—men whom neither financial gain nor political ambition could ever divert from the fulfillment of our sacred trust? Finally, were we truly men of dedication—with an honor mortgaged to no single individual or group, and comprised of no private obligation or aim, but devoted solely to serving the public good and the national interest? Courage—judgment—integrity—dedication—these are the historic qualities,with God’s help, characterize our Government’s conduct in the 4 stormy years that lie ahead." - John F. Kennedy, fully John Fitzgerald "Jack" Kennedy

"It is often said that second thoughts are best. So they are in matters of judgment but not in matters of conscience. " - John Henry Newman

"If advertising has invaded the judgment of children, it has also forced its way into the family, an insolent usurper of parental function, degrading parents to mere intermediaries between their children and the market. This indeed is a social revoluation in our time!" - Jules Henry