Not Merely Treat Quotes & Sayings

Act in such a way that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never merely as a means to an end, but always at the same time as an end. — Immanuel Kant

One theory says that if you treat people well, you're more likely to encourage them to do what you want, making all the effort pay off. Do this, get that. Another one, which I prefer, is that you might consider treating people with kindness merely because you can.
Regardless of what they choose to do in response, this is what you choose to do. Because you can. — Seth Godin

Life is evanescent, but left to itself it rarely fails to offer some consolation. — Ruth Ozeki

Losing through you
what seemed myself, i find
selves unimaginably mine. — E. E. Cummings

I will treat all my negative reactions to this form of meditation as merely thought forms prompted by my ego to keep me from taking it seriously. I will suspend judgment, criticism, and doubt. — Ram Dass

To not give a fuck about adversity, you must first give a fuck about something more important than adversity. Imagine — Mark Manson

too many left-wing student groups treat no one as badly as students of color or women who consider themselves to be classical liberals, libertarians, or conservatives, or who merely disagree with the actions of progressive protesters on campus. They're seen as special kinds of traitors. — Conor Friedersdorf

I am merely noting that the creation of native prostitutes to service foreign privates is an inevitable outcome of a war of occupation, one of those nasty little side effects of defending freedom that all the wives, sisters, girlfriends, mothers, pastors, and politicians in Smallville, USA, pretend to ignore behind waxed and buffed walls of teeth as they welcome their soldiers home, ready to treat any unmentionable afflictions with the penicillin of American goodness. — Viet Thanh Nguyen

If to "aestheticize" is to glide across brutality and cruelty, treat them merely as dramatic occasions for the artist rather than structures of power to be revealed and dismantled - much hangs on the words "merely" and "rather than." Opportunism isn't the same as committed attention. But we can also define the "aesthetic" not as a privileged and sequestered rendering of human suffering, but as news of an awareness, a resistance, that totalizing systems want to quell: art reaching into us for what's still passionate, still unintimidated, still unquenched. — Adrienne Rich

A few conclusions become clear when we understand this: that our most cruel failure in how we treat the sick and the aged is the failure to recognize that they have priorities beyond merely being safe and living longer; that the chance to shape one's story is essential to sustaining meaning in life; that we have the opportunity to refashion our institutions, our culture, and our conversations in ways that transform the possibilities for the last chapters of everyone's lives. — Atul Gawande

From Lankaster to Lorenz, scientists have gotten it wrong. Parasites are complex, highly adapted creatures that are at the heart of the story of life. If there hadn't been such high walls dividing scientists who study life - the zoologists, the immunologists, the mathematical biologists, the ecologists - parasites might have been recognized sooner as not disgusting, or at least not merely disgusting. If parasites were so feeble, so lazy, how was it that they could manage to live inside every free-living species and infect billions of people? How could they change with time so that medicines that could once treat them became useless? How could parasites defy vaccines, which could corral brutal killers like smallpox and polio? — Carl Zimmer

Remember there's always a grain of truth in the prophecies, no matter how much poetry has been frosted on top." ~ Lucas to Helen — Josephine Angelini

When we treat evangelism as merely one of the Christian virtues, it rarely produces much fruit. When evangelism becomes our passion as we walk day by day with Christ, it produces much fruit. — Mike Shipman

One great help here - and I make no claim that it is the only help or even a necessary condition for forgiveness - is sincere repentance on the part of the wrongdoer. When I am wronged by another, a great part of the injury - over and above any physical harm I may suffer - is the insulting or degrading message that has been given to me by the wrongdoer: the message that I am less worthy than he is, so unworthy that he may use me merely as a means or object in service to his desires and projects. Thus failing to resent(or hastily forgiving) the wrongdoer runs the risk that I am endorsing that very immoral message for which the wrongdoer stands. If the wrongdoer sincerely repents, however, he now joins me in repundiating the degrading and insulting message - allowing me to relate to him (his new self) as an equal without fear that a failure to resent him will be read as a failure to resent what he hs done. — Jeffrie G. Murphy

We find the library world, like the real world, impossible to understand on a rational basis. We turn then to the outer reaches of our mind and treat librarianship with the irrationality that it deserves. While we most often turn to humour merely to enjoy ourselves, we do sometimes do so to make a point. That point is simply that the world of librarianship is ridiculous and that we should all take a far less serious view of our work. What we accomplish as librarians is not, after all, likely to change the world."
~ Norman D. Stevens — Peter Gellatly

When we treat people merely as they are, they will remain as they are. When we treat them as if they were what they should be, they will become what they should be. — Thomas S. Monson

Fat is a barrier, a bellicose statement to others that, to some, justifies hostility in kind. The world says to the fat person, "Your fatness is an affront to me, so we have the right to treat you as offensively as you appear." Fat is not merely viewed as another type of tissue, but as a diagnostic sign, a personal statement, and a measure of personality. Too little fat and we see you as being antisocial, fearful and sexless. Too much fat and we see you as slothful, stupid, and sexually hung up. — Albert Ellis

When catering for your spiritual needs make sure that you authenticate the capacity and qualification of the person or people you allow access to your spiritual being. Being careless in this regard is as dangerous as allowing an untrained person to treat you or operate on you to address a medical condition. While the bush-doctor kills your body, the false spiritual leader will destroy body, soul and spirit. Therefore use your belief's spiritual standard, not a merely mental or intellectual standard, to get spiritual help. — Archibald Marwizi

The upside of culling people from my life is that my focus has become very clear. My vision has become razor sharp. I now work to see people, not as I'd rewrite them, but as they have written themselves. I see them for who they are. And for who I am with them. Because it's not merely about surrounding myself with people who treat me well. It's also about surrounding myself with people whose self-worth, self-respect and values inspire me to elevate my own behavior. — Shonda Rhimes

To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God. — Timothy Keller

Critics who treat 'adult' as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. Young things ought to want to grow. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up. — C.S. Lewis

When we look at thing, we must examine its essence and treat its appearance merely as an usher at the threshold, we must, once we cross the threshold, grasp the essence of the thing. — Mao Zedong

It was more that his career was going down again and he was tired of the songs. He was tired of the routine. And there was a point where he just kind of gave up. He couldn't face being 40. And he resorted to stimulants. There's a dark side there, a really dark side. — Priscilla Presley

For the Press has no band of critics who go the round of the churches and chapels, and are on the watch for a slip or defect in the preacher, to make a "feature" in their article: the clergy are practically the most irresponsible of all talkers. For this reason, at least, it is well that they do not always allow their discourses to be merely fugitive, but are often induced to fix them in that black and white in which they are open to the criticism of any man who has the courage and patience to treat them with thorough freedom of speech and pen. — Christopher Hitchens

Maybe having a friend and caring for them no matter what happened was what being brave was all about. — Kerry Alan Denney

The greatness of prayer is nothing but an extension of the greatness and glory of God in our lives To fail to pray, then, is not to merely break some religious rule - it is a failure to treat God as God. It is a sin against his glory — Timothy Keller

Ignorant: a state of not knowing what a pronoun is, or how to find the square root of 27.4, and merely knowing childish and useless things like which of the seventy almost identical-looking species of the purple sea snake are the deadly ones, how to treat the poisonous pith of the Sago-sago tree to make a nourishing gruel, how to foretell the weather by the movements of the tree-climbing Burglar Crab, how to navigate across a thousand miles of featureless ocean by means of a piece of string and a small clay model of your grandfather, how to get essential vitamins from the liver of the ferocious Ice Bear, and other such trivial matters. It's a strange thing that when everyone becomes educated, everyone knows about the pronoun but no one knows about the Sago-sago. — Terry Pratchett

Celyn merely snarled and stalked away.
"You best go to him, sister, and soothe his hurt feelings."
"Why should I?"
"You know how men are. If you treat them nice and buy them gifts, they will suck your pussy like champion. — G.A. Aiken

It is shameful and inhuman to treat men like chattels to make money by, or to regard them merely as so much muscle or physical power. — Pope Leo XIII

Film is the manipulative medium par excellence. When you think back on the history of film and the 20th century, you see the propaganda that's been made. So there are moral demands on the director to treat the spectators as seriously as he or she takes himself and not to see them merely as victims that can be manipulated to whatever ends they have. — Michael Haneke

During the past few years I have avoided tiring myself and losing my breath. I must take care of my body, treat it with respect as a musician does his instrument. I apply nonviolence to my body, for it is not merely a tool to accomplish something. It itself is the end. — Thich Nhat Hanh

The earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth.
All things are connected like the blood that unites one family.
Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it.
Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.
The earth is sacred and men and animals are but one part of it.
Treat the earth with respect so that it lasts for centuries to come and is a place of wonder and beauty for our children. — Extract From Chief Seattle.

I have found that there are two ways of dealing with men. Either you treat them with respect, or you kill them. Anything in between merely breeds resentment and the desire for revenge. — Paul Kearney