Difference Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

The great difference between voyages rests not with the ships, but with the people you meet on them.

God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change,
courage to change the things I can,
and the wisdom to know the difference.

Reinhold Niebuhr

You know the difference between a tornado and divorce in the south? Nothing! Someone is losing a trailer.

The difference between mad people and sane people... is that sane people have variety when they talk-story. Mad people have only one story that they talk over and over.

Maxine Hong Kingston

The difference between a successful person and others is not a lack of strength, not a lack of knowledge, but rather a lack of will.

Notice the difference between what happens when a man says to himself, I have failed three times, and what happens when he says, I am a failure.

The South would be in no more danger in this respect than it was in the days of Washington. I suppose, however, this does not meet the case. You think slavery is right and should be extended; while we think slavery is wrong and ought to be restricted. That I suppose is the rub. It certainly is the only substantial difference between us.

Abraham Lincoln

We went back on a very similar manifesto to things I believe in. The difference is that after eighteen months to two years he did the biggest U-turn on policy of all time and started to go the wrong way. In the end, that cost us the next election.

Margaret Thatcher

Man bears in his bodily structure clear traces of his descent from some lower form; but it may be urged that, as man differs so greatly in his mental power from all other animals, there must be some error in this conclusion. No doubt the difference in this respect is enormous, even if we compare the mind of one of the lowest savages, who has no words to express any number higher than four, and who uses no abstract terms for the commonest objects or affections, with that of the most highly organised ape.

Mathematics, like dialectics, is an instrument of the inner higher sense, while in practice it is an art like rhetoric. For both of these, nothing has value but form; content is immaterial. Whether mathematics is adding up pennies or guineas, whether rhetoric is defending truth or falsehood, makes no difference to either.

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

I confess that I do not understand the principle on which the power to fix a minimum for the wages of women can be denied by those who admit the power to fix a maximum for their hours of work. I fully assent to the proposition that here as elsewhere the distinctions of the law are distinctions of degree, but I perceive no difference in the kind or degree of interference with liberty, the only matter with which we have any concern, between the one case and the other. The bargain is equally affected whichever half you regulate…. It will need more than the Nineteenth Amendment to convince me that there are no differences between men and women, or that legislation cannot take those differences into account.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

It were not the best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.

It will be seen that I look at the term species, as one arbitrarily given for the sake of convenience to a set of individuals closely resembling each other, and that it does not essentially differ from the term variety, which is given to less distinct and more fluctuating forms. The term variety, again, in comparison with mere individual differences, is also applied arbitrarily, and for mere convenience sake.

We are not children twice, as the saying is, but for ever; the difference is that we play bigger games.

Seneca the Younger

Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.

As long as possible live free and uncommitted. It makes but little difference whether you are committed to a farm or the county jail.

Henry David Thoreau

The difference between the most dissimilar characters, between a philosopher and a common street porter, for example, seems to arise not so much from nature, as from habit, custom, and education.

Start a huge, foolish project, like Noah…it makes absolutely no difference what people think of you.

Every word instantly becomes a concept precisely insofar as it is not supposed to serve as a reminder of the unique and entirely individual original experience to which it owes its origin; but rather, a word becomes a concept insofar as it simultaneously has to fit countless more or less similar cases — which means, purely and simply, cases which are never equal and thus altogether unequal. Every concept arises from the equation of unequal things. Just as it is certain that one leaf is never totally the same as another, so it is certain that the concept "leaf" is formed by arbitrarily discarding these individual differences and by forgetting the distinguishing aspects.

Friedrich Nietzsche

To study men, we must look close by; to study man, we must learn to look afar; if we are to discover essential characteristics, we must first observe differences.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

I believe that you can reach the point where there is no longer any difference between developing the habit of pretending to believe and developing the habit of believing.

It is a waste of energy to be angry with a man who behaves badly, just as it is to be angry with a car that won't go. The difference is that you can compel your car to go to a garage, but you cannot compel Hitler to go to a psychiatrist.

Bertrand Russell

Differences are not intended to separate, to alienate. We are different precisely in order to realize our need of one another.

That all men are alike is exactly what society would like to hear. It considers actual or imagined differences as stigmas indicating that not enough has yet been done; that something has still been left outside its machinery, not quite determined by its totality.

Theodor W. Adorno

Unfortunately, now in boxing people are only allowed to punch. In Judo, people are only allowed to throw. I do not despise these kinds of martial arts. What I mean is, we now find rigid forms which create differences among clans, and the world of martial art is shattered as a result.