Judgment Quotes

“It is not things that trouble us,” as Epictetus said, “but our judgment about things,”
― Pierre Hadot, The Inner Citadel: The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius

“Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of a chattel, entirely subject to the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps, and trembled within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more sensibly than I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day. Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought not to be judged by the same standard as others.”
― Harriet Ann Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

“Only the shallow judge others, those with character know to judge themselves before they judge others.”
― Abhijit Naskar, When Call The People: My World My Responsibility

“It's important to note that most judgmental mom shamers don't actually see themselves as judgmental mom shamers. They just like to share their opinions. Out loud. So here's a really easy, single-question quiz to figure out if you're an ass or not: Does every opinion you have need to be voiced? If your answer is yes, you're an ass.”
― Kristina Kuzmic, Hold On, But Don't Hold Still

“There are no unnatural acts, only unacceptable acts.”
― Robert Black

“The first question he had been concerned with—a long time now—was why most crimes were so easily discovered and solved, and why nearly every criminal left so clear a trail. He arrived by degrees at a variety of curious conclusions, and, in his opinion, the chief cause lay not so much in the material impossibility of concealing the crime as in the criminal himself; nearly every criminal, at the moment of the crime, was subject to a collapse of will-power and reason, exchanging them for an extraordinary childish heedlessness, and that just at the moment when judgment and caution were most indispensable.”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Crime and Punishment

“Your hard work and focus will give you speed. Your thoughts and judgments will give you direction.”
― Maxime Lagacé

“True, generous feeling is made small account by some[.] [...] Feeling without judgment is a washy draught indeed; but judgment untempered by feeling is too bitter and husky a morsel for human deglutition.”
― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

“We may compare this mad, deluded world to a company of poor, blind men, dancing about the brink of a very dangerous pit, but do not perceive it or see how each falls in one after another.”
― John Fox

“If I could make my neighbors up, I could love them in a minute. I could make them in my own image, looking back at me with deep gratitude for how authentically human I am being to them—and they to me!—reading poetry to each other, admiring pictures of each other’s grandchildren, and taking casseroles to each other when we are sick. But nine times out of ten these are not the neighbors I get. Instead, I get neighbors who cancel my vote, burn trash in their yard, and shoot guns so close to my house that I have to wear an orange vest when I walk to the mailbox. These neighbors I did not make up knock on my front door to offer me the latest issue of The Watchtower. They put things on their church signs that make me embarrassed for all Christians everywhere. They text while they drive, flipping me off when I pass their expensive pickup trucks on the right, in spite of the fish symbols on their shiny rear bumpers.”
― Barbara Brown Taylor, Holy Envy: Finding God in the Faith of Others

“Don’t invalidate or belittle the thoughts and feelings of others just because your reality looks different. Remember, it’s easy to yell instructions from the sideline, but it’s a whole different ballgame when you are on the battlefield. Judgment and advice are cheap, but compassion is priceless.”
― K.J. Redelinghuys, Unfiltered: Grappling with Mental Illness

“The will to insist upon a definite, unimpeachable reading of an incident - which might well have been read in other, more generous ways - was a mark of a bewildering denial: a denial of the imagination that, liberated to do its proper work, can lead us in alternative directions.”
― Robert Boyers, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies

“We don't always get to decide what others see when they sum us up or reduce us to a caricature of the rich and various selves we think we have fashioned.”
― Robert Boyers, The Tyranny of Virtue: Identity, the Academy, and the Hunt for Political Heresies

“This is so important that I wish I could grab every single one of you by the shoulders, look you in the eye, and say it to you over and over again until it starts to sink it: Please choose to give yourself more credit than criticism and more grace than judgment. You deserve it. And it will change you.”
― Kristina Kuzmic, Hold On, But Don't Hold Still

“Judgment is the death of trust, vulnerability, and openness. When others judge us in our grief, they consciously or unconsciously signal to us that they are not safe places for us to share everything we’re thinking and feeling. It’s natural in the aftermath of loss, as in life in general, to gravitate toward people who are nonjudgmental and receptive. We all need witnesses to our stories, especially when we lose someone we love.”
― Shelby Forsythia, Your Grief, Your Way: A Year of Practical Guidance and Comfort After Loss

“Judge tenderly, if you must. There is usually a side you have not heard, a story you know nothing about, and a battle waged that you do not have to fight.”
― Traci Lea Larussa

“Love or judgment awaits, and your freewill is making a choice; will you choose rightly today?”
― John M Sheehan

“God is giving the world in the coronavirus outbreak, as in all other calamities, a physical picture of the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of God-belittling sin... Here’s my suggestion: God put the physical world under a curse so that the physical horrors we see around us in diseases and calamities would become a vivid picture of how horrible sin is. In other words, physical evil is a parable, a drama, a signpost pointing to the moral outrage of rebellion against God... Calamities are God’s previews of what sin deserves and will one day receive in judgment a thousand times worse. They are warnings. They are wake-up calls to see the moral horror and spiritual ugliness of sin against God.”
― John Piper, Coronavirus and Christ

“Judgment is just another cage we live in so we don't have to feel, know, and imagine. Judgment is self-abandonment. You are not here to waste your time deciding whether my life is true and beautiful enough for you. You are here to decide if your life, relationships, and world are true and beautiful enough for you.”
― Glennon Doyle, Untamed

“There are but a few that look on themselves as concerned at all, just like a company of simple sheep in a fat pasture. The butcher comes and fetches one today, another tomorrow. The rest feed on and take no notice of what is become of their lost companions. 'Tis as if a company of condemned persons (reprieved for a time) should be appointed to be executed one after another...”
― John Fox

“Some people are so wise that they leave you with the impression that they are about a hundred thousand years old.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana

“Ecclesiastes makes the… astonishing claim that living well here and now in this world depends on time travel being possible—not to us, but to God…God will retrieve every single injustice, every single time, and every single activity…Knowing that God is outside of time and sees it all and will, in the end, bring to judgement both the righteous and the wicked, stops me needing to be in control of everything that happens to me.”
― David Gibson

“Whether moral decisions are evaluated by universal standards or by those of local traditions, moral conflicts are always contextual.”
― Ágnes Heller

“I also had this disconnect of believing that I was a Christian, but not like 'those' Christians'. I referred to myself as an 'open-minded Christian'. I thought that true Christians were always peaceful, gentle and accepting. If someone spoke up about a false teaching, I judged that person as not being a true Christian. It's so ironic that before I was saved I used to judge Christians as being judgmental. The irony was lost on me until the first time I was called a 'judgmental Christian', when I was only trying to help someone.”
― Doreen Virtue, Deceived No More: How Jesus Led Me out of the New Age and into His Word

“One of the greatest judgments God can inflict on any people is to let them have their own way.”
― Warren W. Wiersbe, Be Amazed (Minor Prophets): Restoring an Attitude of Wonder and Worship

“The strong counterattack against the values of the European Enlightenment has come just at the time when, for the reasons already given, the confidence of Europe in its own culture is collapsing. The result of the conjunction of these two forces is the phenomenon of multiculturalism, an ideology that celebrates cultural diversity as an unqualified good in its own right. When this ideology takes over, value judgments claiming to discriminate between different cultural traditions in terms of their intrinsic worth are ruled out of order. Cultural diversity is an unqualified good; judgments of good or bad with respect to different cultures are condemned as cultural imperialism.”
― Lesslie Newbigin, Proper Confidence: Faith, Doubt, and Certainty in Christian Discipleship

“Judgment breeds disconnection and contempt; curiosity breeds connection and understanding.”
― Stephanie Meriaux, Navigating Divorce with a Peaceful Heart: A Practical Guide to Cultivating Inner Peace in the Midst of Chaos

“Always be mindful, one has complete authority over psyche, words, and actions. Deliberative judgment of these three things, determine your station in life.”
― Gandolfo – (RJ Intindola) – 1982

“They'll pass judgment until the day she is dead
Like she needs yet another voice in her head
She expected more advice, though, so I said
Nothing... I listened... something she'd never had”
― Criss Jami

“Our entire purpose is to solve the ultimate problems of existence. The task of the meditators and the mindfulness advocates is to flee from every problem, solve no problems, and become animals, devoid of consciousness, untroubled by judgment. They dream of living non-judgmentally in the moment. That’s what cows do. The message of Eastern mysticism and New Ageism is Become a Cow!”
― Jack Tanner, Zarathustra's Out-of-Body Experience: How Humans Become Angels