Finding common ground is often the key to resolving conflicts and building stronger relationships. Whether in personal life, work, or society, compromise allows us to move forward together despite differing viewpoints. To inspire and encourage thoughtful negotiation, we’ve gathered a curated collection of the top 38 best compromise quotes that highlight the wisdom and value behind meeting halfway. Explore these quotes to gain insight and motivation for embracing compromise in your own life.
1. “Still it might be nice, once in a while, not to have to choose between evils. Just once, couldn't I choose the lesser good?” - Laurell K. Hamilton
2. “Do not let us mistake necessary evils for good.” - C.S. Lewis
3. “Indeed the safest road to Hell is the gradual one--the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts,...Your affectionate uncle, Screwtape.” - C.S. Lewis
4. “Come a day there won’t be room for naughty men like us to slip about at all. This job goes south, there well may not be another. So here is us, on the raggedy edge. Don’t push me, and I won’t push you. Dong le ma?” - Joss Whedon
5. “The body can endure compromise and the mind can be seduced by it. Only the heart protests.” - Jeanette Winterson
6. “The middle path makes me wary. . . . But in the middle of my life, I am coming to see the middle path as a walk with wisdom where conversations of complexity can be found, that the middle path is the path of movement. . . . In the right and left worlds, the stories are largely set. . . . We become missionaries for a position . . . practitioners of the missionary position. Variety is lost. Diversity is lost. Creativity is lost in our inability to make love with the world.” - Terry Tempest Williams
7. “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
8. “Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand—that of finding a workable compromise between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.” - Annie Dillard
9. “[W]hat possible purpose does this lashing-out serve? Will activists be shamed into recovering their previous enthusiasm? Will Republicans stop their vicious attacks because Obama is lashing out to his left? It was pure self-indulgence; even if he feels aggrieved, he has to judge his words by their usefulness, not by his desire to vent. This isn't about him.” - Paul Krugman
10. “Compromise means to go just a little bit below what you know is right. It's just a little bit, but it's the little foxes that spoil the vine.” - Joyce Meyer
11. “Unless there is within us that which is above us, we shall soon yield to that which is about us.” - P.T. Forsyth
12. “I wish," he said, "I had known at eighteen what I know now - that there are some things on which one does not compromise.” - Mary Balogh
13. “I can accept anything, except what seems to be the easiest for most people: the half-way, the almost, the just-about, the in-between.” - Ayn Rand
14. “Ideology knows the answer before the question has been asked.Principles are something different: a set of values that have to be adapted to circumstances but not compromised away.” - George Packer
15. “Too often, we say we are defeated by this or that sin. No, we are not defeated. We are simply disobedient. It might be good if we stop using the terms victory and defeat to describe our progress in holiness. Rather, we should use the terms obedience and disobedience. When I say I am defeated by some sin, I am unconsciously slipping out from under my responsibility. I am saying something outside of me has defeated me. But when I say I am disobedient, that places the responsibility for my sin squarely on me. We may in fact be defeated, but the reason we are defeated is because we have chosen to disobey. We need to brace ourselves up and to realize that we are responsible for thoughts, attitudes, and actions. We need to reckon on the fact that we died to sin's reign, that it no longer has any dominion over us, that God has united us with the risen Christ in all His power and has given us the Holy Spirit to work in us. Only as we accept our responsibility and appropriate God's provisions will we make any progress in our pursuit of holiness.” - Jerry Bridges
16. “You cannot build a dream on a foundation of sand. To weather the test of storms, it must be cemented in the heart with uncompromising conviction.” - T.F. Hodge
17. “Most men either compromise or drop their greatest talents and start running after, what they perceive to be, a more reasonable success, and somewhere in between they end up with a discontented settlement. Safety is indeed stability, but it is not progression.” - Criss Jami
18. “In my terms, I settled for the realities of life, and submitted to its necessities: if this, then that, and so the years passed. In Adrian's terms, I gave up on life, gave up on examining it, took it as it came. And so, for the first time, I began to feel a more general remorse - a feeling somewhere between self-pity and self-hatred - about my whole life. All of it. I had lost the friends of my youth. I had lost the love of my wife. I had abandoned the ambitions I had entertained. I had wanted life not to bother me too much, and had succeeded - and how pitiful that was.” - Julian Barnes
19. “The West in general should stand up more for its own values. It is not always worthwhile to compromise.” - Imre Kertesz
20. “In what we call "real life"--if you want to be successful, if you want to get on in the longterm--you always have to come to some kind of compromise with your own emotions: I can't overreact NOW! I have to accept THIS! I have to ignore THAT!--You're forever having to tailor your emotions to the circumstances, you go easy on the people you love, you slip into your hundred little daily roles, you juggle, you balance, you weigh things up so as not to jeopardize the entire structure, because you yourself have a stake in it.” - Daniel Glattauer
21. “Nothing will bind the eyes of man quicker than the touch of compromise. A principle not compromised is a principle worth dying for. A dream not compromised is a dream worth living for.” - Ogwo David Emenike
22. “How wonderful it would be if everything could always be as clear and simple as it used to be when you were twelve years old, or twenty years old. If there really were only two colors in the world: black and white. But even the most honest and ingenuous cop, raised on the resounding ideal of the stars and stripes, has to understand sooner or later that there's more than just Darkness and Light out on the streets. There are understandings, concessions, agreements. Informers, traps, provocations. Sooner or later the time comes when you have to betray your own side, plant bags of heroin in pockets, and beat people on the kidneys—carefully, so there are no marks.” - Sergei Lukyanenko
23. “Can compromise be an art? Yes--but a minor art.” - Joyce Carol Oates
24. “Oh, this was the great ploy of Satan in that kingdom of his: to display such blatant evil one could almost believe one's own secret sin didn't matter.” - Corrie Ten Boom
25. “How many millions there are who don't want to go to Hell, but they don't want to get off the road to Hell.” - Alan Cairns
26. “There is no more confused message that you and I could give to a lost and dying world than to live in sin and at the same time to tell people about the transforming power of Jesus Christ. There isn't a more confusing thing we can do to our kids and the generation behind us, to this world. God will not use a compromised life to reach a compromised world. God will use a life that is given over to Him, that is a demonstration of the message that through the power of Jesus Christ and His love He can transform our lives and set us free.” - Joe Focht
27. “...Sometimes I suspect that what had really happened was that we became more resigned, more cynical, raised our pain thresholds as we lowered our expectations. All in all, settled for less.” - Emma Donoghue
28. “Author points out in Woodrow Wilson the flipside of the positive we might call big picture vision. He observes that as college president Wilson resorted to the language of a national crusade when he met resistance in a local, academic issue.” - David Pietrusza
29. “There's more than one way to skin a cat, my father used to say; it bothered me, I didn't see why they would want to skin a cat even one way.” - Margaret Atwood
30. “To be compromised you need to have a stake in things, you need to have something to lose and something to gain. You have to be risking yourself, not all the time, but enough of the time to be weighing things up, principle over self-preservation, the gains, the losses.” - Patrick McGuinness
31. “Marriage is about compromise; it's about doing something for the other person, even when you don't want to.” - Nicholas Sparks
32. “It's lawmakers know better than anyone that laws are more a matter of practical compromise than any kind of moral imperative.” - Kim Stanley Robinson
33. “When you're socially awkward, you're isolated more than usual, and when you're isolated more than usual, your creativity is less compromised by what has already been said and done. All your hope in life starts to depend on your craft, so you try to perfect it. One reason I stay isolated more than the average person is to keep my creativity as fierce as possible. Being the odd one out may have its temporary disadvantages, but more importantly, it has its permanent advantages.” - Criss Jami
34. “You gave me two alternatives that you could live with, and I chose the one that I could live with. That's how compromise is supposed to work.” - Stephenie Meyer
35. “I have leveled with the girls - from Anchorage to Amarillo.I tell them that all marriages are happyIt's the living together afterward that's tough.I tell them that a good marriage is not a gift,It's an achievement.that marriage is not for kids It takes guts and maturity.It separates the men from the boys and the women from the girls.I tell them that marriage is tested dily by the ability to compromise.Its survival can depend on being smart enough to know what's worth fighting about.Or making an issue of or even mentioning.Marriage is giving - and more important, it's forgiving.And it is almost always the wife who must do these things.Then, as if that were not enough, she must be willing to forget what she forgave.Often that is the hardest part.Oh, I have leveled all right.If they don't get my message, Buster,It's because they don't want to get it.Rose-colored glasses are never made in bifocalsBecause nobody wants to red the small print in dreams.” - Ann Landers
36. “Mark my word, if and when these preachers get control of the [Republican] party, and they're sure trying to do so, it's going to be a terrible damn problem. Frankly, these people frighten me. Politics and governing demand compromise. But these Christians believe they are acting in the name of God, so they can't and won't compromise. I know, I've tried to deal with them.” - Barry Goldwater
37. “Lincoln, considering a Cabinet nominee: "He is a Radical without the petulance and fretfulness of many radicals.” - Doris Kearns Goodwin
38. “Imperfect knowledge, incomplete assessment of feedback, limited memory and recall, as well as poor problem-solving skills result in a form of rationality that attains not optimal decisions but more or less satisfactory compromises between conflicting constraints.” - Manuel de Landa
