Those who deserve to be praised, bear more easily to be criticized.
Valuing those we love is a support, even if this valuing does not measure our exact worth.
When you can't reach the top of the tall statues, you lay wreaths at their feet.
Hate as well as admiration are a sign of importance to him who is their object; a man is not of ordinary stock, when at once he has enthusiasm and hatred.
It is a sign of nobility when admiration outlasts friendship.
Compliments are placed like money is placed: to be returned to us with interest.
Fear the silent envy.
Admiration: ...bountiful wine for noble spirits
Nothing brings small, bitter, discontented souls closer than the thought that they are equally powerless.
We must not restrain our admiration of great perfections merely because discordant faults are interwoven in them.
The envy of men shows how unhappy they are, and their incessant attention to what others are and do, how hateful it is to them.
Let us look especially at those who are worse off than us, than at those who seem to us to be better off.
Flattery pleases, even when uttered by the lips of a fool...praise makes an impression on us, even though we despise the grounds and motives that prompt its expression.
Those who entertain good opinions of a man before they know him well, are wont for a time to take his faults and faults for virtues and talents.
There is always something comic in the contrast between the way transfigured people appear in the eyes of those who love them, and the way they are seen by those who have no such feelings; or, in the same vein, and as they appear in their own eyes.
What flatters someone in a special way is that you consider them worthy of being flattered.
Envy may be tolerated when it springs from admiration awakened by talent...but is there any greater misfortune than to live where superiority arouses envy and not enthusiasm?
Envy: ...punishment that whips itself.
Admiration ...the least selfish form of love.
From the moment when the first step was taken in the decision not to specifically recognize a man's merits, the next steps come naturally, and the art, or whatever you want to call it, of despising him, quickly reaches unsuspected heights.
An honest man may be indignant at those whom he considers undeserving of the situation to which they have arrived: but he is unable to envy them.
Those who always slander, seldom harm; they mean more harm than they can do.
Pizma cannot hide. He accuses and judges without evidence, he magnifies faults, he considers the smallest faults enormous; his speech is full of the gall of exaggeration and reproach. He obstinately and furiously obstinates against obvious merit. She is blind, angry, reckless and brutal.
Admiration is not only wonder. It also includes a sense of esteem, springing from valuing the powers deployed, the difficulties overcome, the results achieved, and this is its moral and uplifting element.
The envious suffer from the success of others as a humiliation as an unforgivable offense to their weakness.
The worship of a human being, under the guise of complete altruism and humility, involves many pretensions and is an attempt at possession.
Disinterestedness: ...the beginning of humanity in man.
The egoist shares with others only his worries and annoyances.
Of all the human sins, the most detestable remains, without any possibility of denial, the unsparingness, the august indifference of man to the sufferings of the man next to him, and this because the denounced vice involves all the others: egotism, insensitivity, lack of memory and emotion, a heap of stigmata, able to deprave the human being to the threshold of the beast, and beyond it.
The indifferent is characterized by an excellent idea of himself, and by another, execrable, of all the rest of mankind seen through a pair of binoculars that shrink men to the filthy size of humunculi. The careless is confident that he can afford anything as it is, in his sacrosanct judgments.