Quotes about Differences

I know there is strength in the differences between us. I know there is comfort where we overlap.

Perhaps the greatest charity comes when we are kind to each other, when we don't judge or categorize someone else, when we simply give each other the benefit of the doubt or remain quiet. Charity is accepting someone's differences, weaknesses, and shortcomings; having patience with someone who has let us down; or resisting the impulse to become offended when someone doesn't handle something the way we might have hoped. Charity is refusing to take advantage of another's weakness and being willing to forgive someone who has hurt us. Charity is expecting the best of each other.

If we are ever to win the deadliest war, we must learn constructive ways to deal with our differences.

Values by their very nature tend to seed differences and oppositions, i.e. to make it possible for us to detect and appreciate the various perspectives from which issues may be seen; even though we (by a profound self-misconception) may find this psychologically and socially unpleasant, for the sake of value-intelligence we must learn to live and to thrive AMIDST such polemics, "in medias res," in utmost self-uncertainty and insecurity. Values, also by their inherent character and natural function, tend to form hierarchies; and even though our egos and appetites and illusions and delusions may resent being afflicted with judgments of rank and superiority/inferiority, again for the sake of connoisseurial and wisdom-seeking value-intelligence we have to stretch and traumatize our minds aristically to understand the rationality and objectivity of such intrinsic hierarchicalism, valid and authoritative over and beyond all that we may have cultivated as our idiosyncratic and subjectivist preferences (idiotia). Aristeia is naturally ingrained in the very nature of values; values are naturally ingrained in the very character and laws of nature.

People with different personalities, different approaches, different values succeed not because one set of values or priorities is superior but because their values and practices are genuine. 

She could write the scene three times over, from three points of view...none of these three was bad, nor were they particularly good.  She need not judge...She need only show seperate minds, as alive as her own, struggling with the idea that other minds were equally alive. It wasn't only wickedness and scheming that made people unhappy, it was confusion and misunderstanding; above all, it was the failure to grasp that other people are as real as you. And only in a story could you enter these different minds and show that they had equal value.  That was the only moral a story need have.

We are all one.  Ours is not a better way, ours is merely another way. 

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

Being 'weird' is one of the most best complements you could ever give someone. If no one in the world was weird, everything would be normal, and that's boring. Be different. Stand out. Be the sore thumb that got hammered a couple times by a heavy mallet. Be that sole bird that's flying in the exact opposite direction everyone else is and hasn't a clue it's winter.

Being 'weird' is one of the most best complements you could ever give someone. If no one in the world was weird, everything would be normal, and that's boring. Be different. Stand out. Be the sore thumb that got hammered a couple times by a heavy mallet. Be that sole bird that's flying in the exact opposite direction everyone else is and hasn't a clue it's winter.

A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: "This way of settling differences is not just." This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

We shouldn’t let our emotions stand in the way of resolving differences.

"Men differ in their virtues, if any, but they are alike in their vices."
--Gail Wynand, The Fountainhead.

The sharing of joy, whether physical, emotional, psychic, or intellectual, forms a bridge between the sharers which can be the basis for understanding much of what is not shared between them, and lessens the threat of their difference.