(394 quotes found)
“Heaven goes by favor; if it went by merit, you would stay out and your dog would go in”
Mark Twain
“Wanting to work is so rare a merit that it should be encouraged.”
Abraham Lincoln
“Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive.”
Friedrich Nietzsche
“Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit, and lost without deserving.”
William Shakespeare
“Between persons of equal income there is no social distinction except the distinction of merit. Money is nothing: character, conduct, and capacity are everything. There would be great people and ordinary people and little people, but the great would always be those who had done great things, and never the idiots whose mothers had spoiled them and whose fathers had left them a hundred thousand a year; and the little would be persons of small minds and mean characters, and not poor persons who had never had a chance. That is why idiots are always in favor of inequality of income (their only chance of eminence), and the really great in favor of equality.”
George Bernard Shaw
“Confronted by outstanding merit, there is no way of saving one's ego except by love”
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
“The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats' teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice”
Mahatma Gandhi
“The practical success of an idea, irrespective of its inherent merit, is dependent on the attitude of the contemporaries. If timely it is quickly adopted; if not, it is apt to fare like a sprout lured out of the ground by warm sunshine, only to be injured and retarded in its growth by the succeeding frost.”
Nikola Tesla
“To listen is an effort, and just to hear is no merit. A duck hears also.”
Igor Stravinsky
“The well-meaning contention that all ideas have equal merit seems to me little different from the disastrous contention that no ideas have any merit.”
Dr. Carl Sagan
