Contempt & Acceptance
Contempt is the attitude and feeling that others are not as good as you are.
It is, of course, related to Pride, Vanity and Arrogance.
Contempt allows you to not accept someone else.
Contempt allows you to think that someone else is much less valuable than you are.
In this way you can protect yourself from honestly dealing with the differences between you and someone else.
In this way, you can feel that you don't need to admit things about yourself that you find difficult to accept.
That helps you to avoid making changes to your own behavior.
It allows you to delay, to postpone your own social development.
When do people learn this kind of thinking?
⩫ ⩫ ⩫
Quotes
“Hatred is an affair of the heart; contempt that of the head.”
Arthur Schopenhauer
“Nothing living should ever be treated with contempt. Whatever it is that lives, a man, a tree, or a bird, should be touched gently, because the time is short. Civilization is another word for respect for life...”
Elizabeth Goudge, Green Dolphin Street
“Hating skin color is contempt for God's divine creative imagination. Honoring it is appreciation for conscious, beautiful-love-inspired diversity.”
T.F. Hodge, From Within I Rise
“Anger and hate against one we love steels our hearts, but contempt or pity leaves us silent and ashamed.”
Edgar Rice Burroughs
“You can spit on a rose, but it's still a rose.”
Marty Rubin
“Teach not thy lip such scorn, for it was made For kissing, lady, not for such contempt.”
William Shakespeare
“Contempt is the weapon of the weak and a defense against one's own despised and unwanted feelings.”
Alice Miller
“The way to be really despicable is to be contemptuous of other people's pain.”
James Baldwin
“I've seen a look in dogs' eyes, a quickly vanishing look of amazed contempt, and I am convinced that basically dogs think humans are nuts.”
John Steinbeck
“Familiarity breeds contempt.”
Aesop
“Familiarity breeds contempt - and children.”
Mark Twain
“Don't hold your parents up to contempt. After all, you are their son, and it is just possible that you may take after them.”
Evelyn Waugh
“God shows his contempt for wealth by the kind of person he selects to receive it.”
Austin O'Malley
“Terrorism is contempt for human dignity.”
Kjell Magne Bondevik
“Love of glory can only create a great hero; contempt of glory creates a great man.”
Charles Maurice de Talleyrand
“He who joyfully marches to music in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
Albert Einstein
“Comedy is defiance. It's a snort of contempt in the face of fear and anxiety. And it's the laughter that allows hope to creep back on the inhale.”
Will Durst
“True humor springs not more from the head than from the heart. It is not contempt; its essence is love. It issues not in laughter, but in still smiles, which lie far deeper.”
Thomas Carlyle
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
William Hazlitt
“Therefore, when I considered this carefully, the contempt which I had to fear because of the novelty and apparent absurdity of my view, nearly induced me to abandon utterly the work I had begun.”
Nicolaus Copernicus
“There is no surer sign of decay in a country than to see the rites of religion held in contempt.”
Niccolo Machiavelli
“As a society, our decision to heap shame and contempt upon those who struggle and fail in a system designed to keep them locked up and locked out says far more about ourselves than it does about them.”
Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness
"As painful as it is to receive contempt from another, it is more debilitating by far to be filled with contempt for another. In this too I speak from painful experience. My own contempt for others is the most debilitating pain of all, for when I am in the middle of it -- when I'm seeing resentfully and disdainfully -- I condemn myself to living in a disdained, resented world."
Arbinger Institute Anatomy of Peace: Resolving the Heart of Conflict
⩫ ⩫ ⩫
Links
❖ ❖ ❖