Difference Quotes

500+ Sourced quotes

In my utter impotence to test the authenticity of the report of my senses, to know whether the impressions they make on me correspond with outlying objects, what difference does it make, whether Orion is up there in heaven, or some god paints the image in the firmament of the soul?

Ralph Waldo Emerson

No one returns from Christianity to the same state he was before Christianity but into a worse state: the difference between a pagan and an apostate is the difference between an unmarried woman and an adulteress. For faith perfects nature but faith lost corrupts nature. Therefore many men of our time have lost not only the supernatural light but also the natural light which pagans possessed.

And, moreover, when it happens that both are sincere and good, nothing will mix and amalgamate more easily than an old priest and an old soldier. In reality, they are the same kind of man. One has devoted himself to country upon earth, the other to his country in heaven; there is no other difference.

Tact is the discrimination of differences. It consists in conscious deviations.

Theodor W. Adorno

The difference between appreciation and flattery? That is simple. One is sincere and the other insincere. One comes from the heart out; the other from the teeth out. One is unselfish; the other selfish. One is universally admired; the other universally condemned.

The quality of the thought differences the Egyptian and the Roman, the Austrian and the American.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Post-Christian man is not the same as Pre-Christian man. He is as far removed as virgin is from widow: there is nothing in common except want of a spouse: but there is a great difference between a spouse-to-be and a spouse lost.

I don't think there is any difference between fantasy and reality in the way these should be approached in a film. Of course if you live that way you are clinically insane.

Martin Scorsese

The most evident difference springs from the important part which is played in man by a relatively strong power of imagination and by the capacity to think, aided as it is by language and other symbolically devices.

Albert Einstein

The individual is ephemeral, races and nations come and pass away, but man remains. Therein lies the profound difference between the individual and the whole.

But every little difference may become a big one if it is insisted on.

We weren't getting a fair deal on the budget and I wasn't going to have it. There's a great strand of equity and fairness in the British people - this is our characteristic. There's not a strand of equity and fairness in Europe - they're out to get as much as they can. That's one of those enormous differences. So I tackled it on that basis.

Margaret Thatcher

Somehow the killing of the giant spider, all alone by himself in the dark without the help of the wizard or the dwarves or of anyone else, made a great difference to Mr. Baggins. He felt a different person, and much fiercer and bolder in spite of an empty stomach, as he wiped his sword on the grass and put it back into its sheath.

J. R. R. Tolkien

I do believe that the outward and the inward life correspond; that if any should succeed to live a higher life, others would not know of it; that difference and distance are one. To set about living a true life is to go on a journey to a distant country, gradually to find ourselves surrounded by new scenes and men; and as long as the old are around me, I know that I am not in any true sense living a new or a better life.

Henry David Thoreau

The only very marked difference between the average civilized man and the average savage is that the one is gilded and the other is painted.

You tell us that Democritus says that there are a countless number of worlds, and that there are some which are not only so like one another, but so completely and absolutely equal in every point, that there is no difference whatever between them, and that they are quite innumerable; and so also are men.

On your eyelids crown the god of sleep,
Charming your blood with pleasing heaviness,
Making such difference 'twixt wake and sleep
As is the difference betwixt day and night
The hour before the heavenly-harness'd team
Begins his golden progress in the east.

William Shakespeare

Know the difference between a catastrophe and an inconvenience. — To realize that it's just an inconvenience, that it is not a catastrophe, but just an unpleasantness, is part of coming into your own, part of waking up.

Hence both women and children must be educated with an eye to the constitution, if indeed it makes any difference to the virtue of a city-state that its children be virtuous, and its women too. And it must make a difference, since half the free population are women, and from children come those who participate in the constitution.

There was as great a difference between them as between a man who knew how a watch was made, and a man who could tell the hour by looking on the dial-plate.

What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans, and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or the holy name of liberty and democracy?

The difference is that music possesses much richer means of expression and is a more subtle medium for translating the thousand shifting moments of the feelings of the soul.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

What can you do to make a difference? And why should you do it? (...) the scale of one's social investments doesn't matter. What matters is that you operate as a force for good at every scale available to you.

Richard Branson

Ice is an interesting subject for contemplation. They told me that they had some in the ice-houses at Fresh Pond five years old which was as good as ever. Why is it that a bucket of water soon becomes putrid, but frozen remains sweet forever? It is commonly said that this is the difference between the affections and the intellect.

Henry David Thoreau

If you were to insist I was a robot, you might not consider me capable of love in some mystic human sense, but you would not be able to distinguish my reactions from that which you would call love — so what difference would it make?