104 Judgment Quotes

In our daily lives, judgment often plays a pivotal role, guiding our decisions, shaping our interactions, and influencing our perspectives. Whether it’s self-reflection or evaluating the world around us, judgment is a powerful force with the potential to enlighten as well as divide. To navigate this complex landscape, we’ve curated a collection of the top 104 judgment quotes, offering insights from philosophers, thinkers, and visionaries. These quotes serve not just as food for thought, but as potential catalysts for personal growth and understanding. Explore these timeless words of wisdom and let them inspire a more thoughtful and compassionate approach to judgment in all its forms.

1. “I intend to judge things for myself; to judge wrongly, I think, is more honorable than not to judge at all.” - Henry James

2. “You're going to come across people in your life who will say all the right words at all the right times. But in the end, it's always their actions you should judge them by. It's actions, not words, that matter.” - Nicholas Sparks

3. “Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.” - John Boyle O'Reilly

4. “Some people believe holding on and hanging in there are signs of great strength. However, there are times when it takes much more strength to know when to let go and then do it.” - Ann Landers

5. “I think fish is nice, but then I think that rain is wet, so who am I to judge?” - Douglas Adams

6. “What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more' ... Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

7. “What condemnation could possibly be more harsh than one’s own, when self-pretense is no longer possible?” - Richard Matheson

8. “The reality of the Life Review is becoming part of our every day understanding. We know that after death, we have to look at our lives again; and we’re going to agonize over every missed opportunity, over every case in which we failed to act. This knowledge is contributing to our determination to pursue every intuitive image that comes to mind, and keep it firmly in awareness. We’re living life in a more deliberate way. We don’t want to miss a single important event. We don’t want the pain of looking back later and realizing that we blew it, that we failed to make the right decisions.” - James Redfield

9. “Our lives can't be measured by our final years, of this I am sure.” - Nicholas Sparks

10. “Can you be happy with the movies, and the ads, and the clothes in the stores, and the doctors, and the eyes as you walk down the street all telling you there is something wrong with you? No. You cannot be happy. Because, you poor darling baby, you believe them.” - Katherine Dunn

11. “As one judge said to another judge: be just. And if you can’t be just, be arbitrary” - William S. Burroughs

12. “you have to be the prude or the slut, and if you pick one, other people hate you for it, and you can’t trust anyone anymore, because they’re all after the same thing, and you see that you can never go back to how was before…” - Ned Vizzini

13. “The excitable observer will pass judgement first and then make knowledge conform to judgement; the prudent observer will first learn to know and then judge according to knowledge.” - Thomas Cleary (Ways of Warriors Codes of Kings)

14. “No speech is ever considered, but only the speaker. It's so much easier to pass judgement on a man than on an idea.” - Ayn Rand

15. “Children must be taught how to think, not what to think.” - Margaret Mead

16. “I have but one lamp by which my feet are guided, and that is the lamp of experience. I know no way of judging of the future but by the past.” - Patrick Henry

17. “The man who refuses to judge, who neither agrees nor disagrees, who declares that there are no absolutes and believes that he escapes responsibility, is the man responsible for all the blood that is now spilled in the world. Reality is an absolute, existence is an absolute, a speck of dust is an absolute and so is a human life. Whether you live or die is an absolute. Whether you have a piece of bread or not, is an absolute. Whether you eat your bread or see it vanish into a looter's stomach, is an absolute.There are two sides to every issue: one side is right and the other is wrong, but the middle is always evil. The man who is wrong still retains some respect for truth, if only by accepting the responsibility of choice. But the man in the middle is the knave who blanks out the truth in order to pretend that no choice or values exist, who is willing to sit out the course of any battle, willing to cash in on the blood of the innocent or to crawl on his belly to the guilty, who dispenses justice by condemning both the robber and the robbed to jail, who solves conflicts by ordering the thinker and the fool to meet each other halfway. In any compromise between food and poison, it is only death that can win. In any compromise between good and evil, it is only evil that can profit. In that transfusion of blood which drains the good to feed the evil, the compromise is the transmitting rubber tube.” - Ayn Rand

18. “It is only on the basis of the probable and the apparent that men bereft of a sixth sense are able to sit in judgment over other men.” - Petrus Borel

19. “Excellent memories are often coupled with feeble judgments.” - Michel de Montaigne

20. “The ability to observe without evaluating is the highest form of intelligence.” - J. Krishnamurti

21. “These people who can see right through you never quite do you justice, because they never give you credit for the effort you're making to be better than you actually are, which is difficult and well meant and deserving of some little notice.” - Marilynne Robinson

22. “When one experiences truth, the madness of finding fault with others disappears.” - S.N. Goenka

23. “Your success and happiness are forgiven you only if you generously consent to share them. But to be happy it is essential not to be too concerned with others. Consequently, there is no escape. Happy and judged, or absolved and wretched.” - Albert Camus

24. “Because it strikes me there is something greater than judgement. I think it is called mercy.” - Sebastian Barry

25. “God will judge us, Mr. Harris, by--by what we did to relieve the suffering of our fellow human beings. I don't think God cares what doctrine we embrace.” - Abraham Verghese

26. “When you're too religious, you tend to point your finger to judge instead of extending your hand to help.” - Steve Maraboli

27. “Everyone complains of his memory, and no one complains of his judgment.” - Francois de La Rochefoucauld

28. “The sky over Patusan was blood-red, immense, streaming like an open vein. An enormous sun nestled crimson amongst the treetops, and the forest below had a black and forbidding face.” - Joseph Conrad

29. “I don't judge people. It blurs out the center of my attention,my focus, myself.” - Toba Beta [Betelgeuse Incident]

30. “No one truly knows what they will do in a certain situation until they are actually in it. It's very easy to judge someone else's actions by what you assume your own would be, if you were in their shoes. But we only know what we THINK we would do, not what we WOULD do.” - Ashly Lorenzana

31. “If we all were judged according to the consequencesOf all our words and deeds, beyond the intentionAnd beyond our limited understandingOf ourselves and others, we should all be condemned.” - T. S. Eliot

32. “Judgement can do without knowledge: but not knowledge without judgement.” - Michel de Montaigne

33. “The deadliest Pharisaism today is not hypocrisy, but unconscious unreality.” - Oswald Chambers

34. “There is a tendency at every important but difficult crossroad to pretend that it's not really there.” - Bill McKibben

35. “One must not let oneself be misled: they say 'Judge not!' but they send to Hell everything that stands in their way.” - Friedrich Nietzsche

36. “Great men look greater than yesterday.” - Toba Beta

37. “Nothing that grieves us can be called little: by the eternal laws of proportion a child's loss of a doll and a king's loss of a crown are events of the same size.” - Mark Twain

38. “We cannot consent to be judged by someone who has suffered less than ourselves. And since each of us regards himself as an unrecognized Job...” - Emil Cioran

39. “No one is responsible for what he is nor even for what he does. This is obvious and everyone more or less agrees that it is so. Then why celebrate or denigrate? Because to exist is to evaluate, to emit judgments, and because abstention, when it is not the effect of apathy or cowardice, requires an effort no one manages to make.” - Emil Cioran

40. “We judge others instantly by their clothes, their cars, their appearance, their race, their education, their social status. The list is endless. What gets me is that most people decide who another person is before they have even spoken to them. What's even worse is that these same people decide who someone else is, and don't even know who they are themselves.” - Ashly Lorenzana

41. “If anything or anyone removes peace from you or inflicts confusion and judgment on you, this thing or person is not of God regardless of whether or not that person or thing has wrapped itself/himself in the wrapping paper with God's face printed all over it. Don't stop believing in God but stop believing in that person, in that thing. The wrapping paper with God's face stamped all over it isn't really God.” - C. JoyBell C.

42. “If you live in such a manner as to stand the test of the last judgment, you can depend upon it that the world will not speak well of you.” - Alistair Begg

43. “If you succeed in judging yourself rightly, then you are indeed a man of true wisdom.” - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

44. “I am aware that I am less than some people prefer me to be, but most people are unaware that I am so much more than what they see.” - Douglas Pagels

45. “Why was the judgement of the disapproving so valuable? Who said that their good opinions tended to be any more rational than those of generally pleasant people?” - Shannon Hale

46. “Judge righteously between every man and his brother, and the stranger that is with him. Ye shall not respect persons in judgement; but ye shall hear the small as well as the great; ye shall not be afraid of the face of man; for the judgement is God's.” - Anonymous

47. “We are so scared of being judged that we look for every excuse to procrastinate.” - Erica Jong

48. “A rose is not its thorns, a peach is not its fuzz and a human being is not his or her crankiness.” - Lisa Kogan

49. “We are all hypocrites. We cannot see ourselves or judge ourselves the way we see and judge others.” - Jose Emilio Pacheco

50. “Don't you find it odd," she continued, "that when you're a kid, everyone, all the world, encourages you to follow your dreams. But when you're older, somehow they act offended if you even try.” - Ethan Hawke

51. “The problem with ID, of course, is that it leaves open the possibility that the intelligence behind nature may have a moral interest in us, having communicated already with humanity in the past, and might try to boss you around in your private affairs.With hypothetical advanced aliens residing at a safely distant address in the hypothetical multiverse, that is - to the relief of folks like Gribbin, Dawkins and the New Scientist - manifestly not the case.” - David Klinghoffer

52. “Beauty’s not only skin deep. Just because a person is beautifuldoesn’t mean there’s no soul beneath. Doesn’t meanthat person hasn’t suffered like everyone else, doesn’t meanthey don’t hope to still be a good human being in an awfulworld. (Gabriel)” - Rachel Cohn

53. “Once again she would arrive at a foreign place. Once again be the newcomer, an outsider, the one who did not belong. She knew from experience that she would quickly have to ingratiate herself with her new masters to avoid being rejected or, in more dire cases, punished. Then there would be the phase where she would have to sharpen her senses in order to see and hear as acutely as possible so that she could assimilate quickly all the new customs and the words most frequently used by the group she was to become a part of--so that finally, she would be judged on her own merits.” - Laura Esquivel

54. “Indubitably, Magick is one of the subtlest and most difficult of the sciences and arts. There is more opportunity for errors of comprehension, judgement and practice than in any other branch of physics.” - Aleister Crowley

55. “It's okay to disagree with the thoughts or opinions expressed by other people. That doesn't give you the right to deny any sense they might make. Nor does it give you a right to accuse someone of poorly expressing their beliefs just because you don't like what they are saying. Learn to recognize good writing when you read it, even if it means overcoming your pride and opening your mind beyond what is comfortable.” - Ashly Lorenzana

56. “There will always be someone willing to hurt you, put you down, gossip about you, belittle your accomplishments and judge your soul. It is a fact that we all must face. However, if you realize that God is a best friend that stands beside you when others cast stones you will never be afraid, never feel worthless and never feel alone.” - Shannon Alder

57. “The bad psychological material is not a sin but a disease. It does not need to be repented of, but to be cured. And by the way, that is very important. Human beings judge one another by their external actions. God judges them by their moral choices. When a neurotic who has a pathological horror of cats forces himself to pick up a cat for some good reason, it is quite possible that in God's eyes he has shown more courage than a healthy man may have shown in winning the V.C. When a man who has been perverted from his youth and taught that cruelty is the right thing does dome tiny little kindness, or refrains from some cruelty he might have committed, and thereby, perhaps, risks being sneered at by his companions, he may, in God's eyes, be doing more than you and I would do if we gave up life itself for a friend.It is as well to put this the other way round. Some of us who seem quite nice people may, in fact, have made so little use of a good heredity and good upbringing that we are really worse than those whom we regard as fiends. Can we be quite certain how we should have behaved if we had been saddled with the psychological outfit, and then with the bad upbringing, and then with the power, say, of Himmler? That is why Christians are told not to judge. We see only the results which a man's choices make out of his raw material. But God does not judge him on the raw material at all, but on what he has done with it. Most of the man's psychological makeup is probably due to his body: when his body dies all that will fall off him, and the real central man, the thing that chose, that made the best or worst out of this material, will stand naked. All sorts of nice things which we thought our own, but which were really due to a good digestion, will fall off some of us: all sorts of nasty things which were due to complexes or bad health will fall off others. We shall then, for the first time, see every one as he really was. There will be surprises.” - C.S. Lewis

58. “Beauty is bought by judgement of the eye.” - William Shakespeare

59. “Heroes and scholars represent the opposite extremes... The scholar struggles for the benefit of all humanity, sometimes to reduce physical effort, sometimes to reduce pain, and sometimes to postpone death, or at least render it more bearable. In contrast, the patriot sacrifices a rather substantial part of humanity for the sake of his own prestige. His statue is always erected on a pedestal of ruins and corpses... In contrast, all humanity crowns a scholar, love forms the pedestal of his statues, and his triumphs defy the desecration of time and the judgment of history.” - Santiago Ramón y Cajal

60. “14. Muddy Road Tanzan and Ekido were once traveling together down a muddy road. A heavy rain was still falling. Coming around a bend, they met a lovely girl in a silk kimono and sash, unble to cross the intersection. "Come on, girl," said Tanzan at once. Lifting her in his arms, he carriedher over the mud. Ekido did not speak again until that night when they reached a lodging temple. Then he could no longer restrain himself. "We monks don't go near females," he told Tanzan, "especially not young and lovely ones. It is dangerous. Why did you do that?" "I left the girl there," said Tanzan. "Are you still carrying her?” - Nyogen Senzaki and Paul Reps

61. “A representative owes not just his industry but his judgement” - Edmund Burke

62. “She was of traditional build herself, but her figure was largely concealed by the folds of a generously cut shift dress made out of a flecked green fabric. It was like a tent, thought Mma Ramotswe--a camouflage tent of the sort that the Botswana Defence Force might use. But I do not sit in judgement on the dresses of others, she told herself, and a tent was a practical enough garment, if that is what one felt comfortable in.” - Alexander McCall Smith

63. “It is not for me to judge another man's life. I must judge, I must choose, I must spurn, purely for myself. For myself, alone.” - Herman Hesse

64. “Worry less about what other people think about you, and more about what you think about them.” - Fay Weldon

65. “Writers are often the worst judges of what they have written.” - Stephen King

66. “Intuition is unconscious accumulated experience informing judgement in real time.” - Alain De Botton

67. “When it comes to privacy and accountability, people always demand the former for themselves and the latter for everyone else.” - David Brin

68. “That mess about judging people by the content of their character and not the color of their skin—that's some bullshit. Nobody has the right to judge anybody else. Period. If you ain't been in my skin, you ain't never gonna understand my character.” - Emily Raboteau

69. “Don't judge a man by his opinions, but what his opinions have made of him.” - Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

70. “It's not the error in the book, it's the thought that counts.” - Edna Stewart

71. “When we make judgements we're inevitably acting on limited knowledge, isn't it best to ask if we seek to understand, or simply let them be?” - jay woodman

72. “It is said that most people judge themselves too harshly. I disagree. If they judged themselves harshly enough, they would come to the conclusion that they’re the last person on Earth to be judging anyone.” - Silvia Hartmann

73. “I have never fully unbosomed myself to any human being; I have never been encouraged to trust much in the sympathy of my fellow men. But we have all a chance of meeting with some pity, some tenderness, some charity, when we are dead: it is the living only who cannot be forgiven - the living only from whom men's indulgence and reverence are held off, like the rain by the hard east wind. While the heart beats, bruise it - it is your only opportunity; while the eye can still turn towards you with moist, timid entreaty, freeze it with an icy unanswering gaze; while the ear, that delicate messenger to the inmost sanctuary of the soul, can still take in the tones of kindness, put it off with hard civility, or sneering compliment, or envious affectation of indifference; while the creative brain can still throb with the sense of injustice, with the yearning for brotherly recognition - make haste - oppress it with your ill-considered judgements, your trivial comparisons, your careless misrepresentations. The heart will by and by be still - ubi saeoa indignatio ulterius cor lacerate nequit; the eye will cease to entreat; the ear will be deaf; the brain will have ceased from all wants as well as from all work. Then your charitable speeches may find vent; then you may remember and pity the toil and the struggle and the failure; then you may give due honour to the work achieved; then you may find extenuation for errors, and may consent to bury them ("The Lifted Veil")” - Mary Ann Evans

74. “Literature is humanity's broad-minded alter-ego, with room in its heart for monsters, even for you. It's humanity without the judgement.” - Glen Duncan

75. “Often those that criticise others reveal what he himself lacks.” - Shannon L. Alder

76. “When God grabs you by the scruff of the neck then although theoretically you have a freedom to say 'no', in another sense, actually, you can't say no because it's like Jeremiah. 'God, you have cheated me. You called me to be a prophet against the people that I love, and all that I proclaim is words of doom and judgement.' And yet if I say "I will shut up", I can't.” - Desmond Tutu

77. “Mas, no que se refere a este tribunal, a virtude negativa da tolerância deve transformar-se na virtude menos fácil, mas mais elevada, da justiça. Sobretudo, quando o vazio de um coração, assim como o que descobrimos neste homem, se torna um abismo onde a sociedade pode sucumbir. [...] Ainda na opinião dele, um homem que matava moralmente a mãe devia ser afastado da sociedade dos homens,exatamente como o que levantava a mão criminosa contra o autor de seus dias. Em todos os casos, o primeiro preparava os atos do segundo, anunciava-os, de certa forma, e legitimava-os. [...] - Peço-vos a cabeça deste homem - disse. E é sem escrúpulos que vos dirijo este pedido. Pois no decorrer da minha longa carreira tem-me acontecido pedir a pena capital, mas nunca como hoje eu senti este penoso dever tão compensado, equilibrado, iluminado pela consciência de um mandamento sagrado e imperativo e pelo horror que sinto diante de um rosto humano onde nada leio que não seja monstruoso.” - Albert Camus

78. “It's time to give the gavel back to God, we were never meant to be judges.” - Evinda Lepins

79. “Arrogance is someone claiming to have come to Christ, but they won't spend more than five minutes listening to your journey because they are more concerned about their own well being, rather than being a true disciple of Christ. Blessed is the person that takes the time to heal and hear another person so they can move on.” - Shannon L. Alder

80. “True saddness is when someone still thinks your the same person after all these years. They brand you because of their own ego, fear and lack of spirituality. What's sadder is when they are Christian.” - Shannon L. Alder

81. “Always give your resume of good deeds when you run into someone that you wronged many years ago. They simply need to know today's version of you, before they judge you on yesterday's news.” - Shannon L. Alder

82. “Why Judge someone? What gives YOU the right? We are all humans and we all have stories. Don't be critical on people...For how would you like it if they said that about you?” - Violet Lillydale

83. “…It's as if they actually think that what other people think of them somehow doesn't matter. I mean, I know we're all supposed to believe that, but obviously, none of us actually do. And nor should we, because it does! It does matter! And the people who genuinely believe it doesn't tend to be the very people who ought to care most what other people think of them, because what the other people are thinking is, 'No, actually, I don't think the Chinese are "up to something,"' or, 'You should use mouthwash,' or, 'Your mania for the collective socialization of agriculture will surely cause the deaths of millions,' or, 'Forty cats is too many cats.” - David Mitchell

84. “I am a terrible judge of character' "I don't think so. You just need to take note of FACTS from the outset, not feelings.” - Freya North

85. “Be silent and safe — silence never betrays you; Be true to your word and your work and your friend; Put least trust in him who is foremost to praise you,Nor judge of a road till it draw to the end.James Jeffery Roche” - James McAllister

86. “People that have trust issues only need to look in the mirror. There they will meet the one person that will betray them the most.” - Shannon L. Alder

87. “a man only knows what he's experienced” - Ralph Waldo Emerson

88. “...our impulses are too strong for our judgement sometimes” - Thomas Hardy

89. “Kaldar almost never stops and thinks about the consequences of his actions. Something is fun or not fun, and my brother’s fun often lands him in interesting places such as jails or castles belonging to California robber barons. Where other people see certain death, my brother sees an opportunity for a hilarious, thrilling adventure. But when I got the tattoo, Kaldar warned me that marrying her was a bad idea.” - Ilona Andrews

90. “One thing I have learned is that the people who label you are usually the ones who know the least about who you really are and they have never made the effort to learn different.” - J.S. Goldstine

91. “Never judge others. You both know good and well how unexpected events can change who a person is. Always keep that in mind. You never know what someone else is experiencing within their own life.” - Colleen Hoover

92. “You will be a beautiful person, as long as you see the beauty in others.” - Bryant McGill

93. “Of all the judgments we pass in life, none is more important than the judgment we pass on ourselves.” - Nathaniel Branden

94. “Don’t water your testimony with your righteous expectations of church members. Their imperfection will disappoint you every time and cause you to leave every church you try to join.” - Shannon L. Alder

95. “I thought how you can never tell just by looking at them what they were thinking or what was happening In their lives. Even when you got daft people or drunk people on buses, people that went on stupid and shouted rubbish or tried to tell you all about themselves, you could never really tell about them either... I knew if somebody looked at me, they'd know nothing about me, either.” - David Almond

96. “Human Error lies in judgment. While many will say that it's wrong to judge, one cannot survive in the light or the darkness without equipping the ability to judge. One must judge their morality. One must judge their potentiality. One must judge their actuality. One must judge their life. One must judge their very existence. What happens when God no longer lends a helping a hand? What happens whenGod longer judges you? Only you can be the arbiter of your own existence. However, you will have to judge. So let me ask you, what's the difference between judging the subjective reality that one exists in, and judging the value of the subjective reality of another? The only difference lies is the sameness of one conception...judgment. So tell me, is it wrong to judge others, when your very existence depends on you judging reality for validity?” - Lionel Suggs

97. “So how does God affect justice in this life/economy/reality? A lightening bolt, an angel of death, or by the hand of a human being?"~R. Alan Woods [2012]” - R. Alan Woods

98. “Consider the source...Don't be a fool by listening to a fool.” - Sylvester Stallone

99. “People from different cultures have different definitions for beauty. Isn't that sad to judge others with our standards... rather than appreciate them?” - Mizuki Nomura

100. “The problem with Christianity is more people profess the truth than live it. So much hypocrisy abounds that I can no longer say I count myself among them without being held to the same unachievable standard.” - Shannon L. Alder

101. “We are all the judges and the judged, victims of the casual malice and fantasy of others, and ready sources of fantasy and malice in our turn. And if we are sometimes accused of sins of which we are innocent, are there not also other sins of which we are guilty and of which the world knows nothing?” - Iris Murdoch

102. “A majority opinion does not represent the ultimate decision because such a view is not unanimous and lacks general will.” - Duop Chak Wuol

103. “If you spend your time hoping someone will suffer the consequences for what they did to your heart, then you're allowing them to hurt you a second time in your mind.” - Shannon L. Alder

104. “How so much honourable is such a contest, in which one's moral conduct and achievement are brought as witnesses rather than the size of one's purse.#Page: 10” - Kazuo Ishiguro