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Who Originally Said 'Comparison Is The Thief Of Joy'?

2026-04-22 22:01:41
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3 Jawaban

Dominic
Dominic
I read this quote in an old self help book that I found in a secondhand store years ago. At the time I was struggling with jealousy as I felt that my friends were living better lives than me as they posted about their incredible holidays on Facebook and Twitter. The quote has since become one of my favorites as it sums up the feeling that comparison causes so eloquently. It is commonly attributed to Theodore Roosevelt although he never wrote the exact words. The closest I can find is a letter written by him in 1916 where he said “Comparison with others would be odious…” The quote has since been paraphrased and used by everyone from Buddhist teachers on desire to modern psychological studies into the causes of dissatisfaction in the social media age.

Why does this quote have staying power? It can get referenced in all sorts of contexts — a self-help podcast for example, or a negative vision of the future in a novel such as The Circle by Dave Eggers, in which a constantly ranking, implanted-tinis-dispensing system has siphoned all joy from the characters’ lives. There’s something fundamental to our nature in this caustic assessment.
2026-04-24
Jordyn
Jordyn
Literature professor of mine wrote this out on the blackboard in the middle of a heated class debate about competitive academia. We spent the rest of the hour examining how comparison culture has manifested in literature, from the Victorian novels in which characters destroyed themselves trying to keep up with their neighbors to the regime of the influencer in contemporary culture. As for Roosevelt, much of the quote can be attributed to Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations on the importance of focusing inward. My grandparents would have interpreted this quote in the context of the postwar period of scarcity; my niece would see it in light of the beauty standards upheld on TikTok.

The quote has now become something that is easy to reference but difficult to attribute. In the past year or so, it has become a sort of hashtag or Instagram caption, even a embroidered pillow in some cases. It is most frequently referenced by CEOs during massive layoffs and by pre-prom teens and other nervous youth. And although the quote is referenced frequently, its original meaning has not been lost, only recontextualized for the highlights-reel obsessed.
2026-04-24
Quentin
Quentin
Do you know who said that? I chased down the source for you and it appears to be from Theodore Roosevelt’s autobiography from 1910 (competition for jealousy). I have seen this quote mistakenly attributed to C.S. Lewis or even Confucius but the quote as it was originally written (or re-written) is classic. In fact it’s a concept that psychology has been able to confirm in relation to social comparison theory but it’s also been written beautifully over 100 years ago by someone else. I actually really like this quote in The Midnight Library where the characters live out alternate lives of comparison to each other.
2026-04-28

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Asal be happy stranger artinya berasal dari mana?

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I think I’ve seen this used as a title for a playlist on something like Spotify or YouTube Music. Someone has curated a playlist of mood music for ‘Melancholy Walks at 3 AM’ or ‘Crying in the Rain’ and given it this sort of enigmatic title. Listeners then associate that title with the general mood of the playlist rather than any specific song. I think this is how a lot of the atmospheric phrases get used – through curation and aesthetic labeling in digital spaces designed to impart a particular vibe rather than to tell a story.

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Where is the main setting of 'Skandar and the Unicorn Thief'?

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what was the first dystopian novel

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What is the origin of whisper in the wind in literature?

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For another example, let’s consider music. In the last 50 years or so, song lyrics have done more to keep this phrase in the popular consciousness than all novels combined. As I noted in an earlier post, we find this phrase in a wide array of musical genres: folk ballads, power metal songs, New Age music. The phrase has probably reached more people recently through songs like these than through reading words written by Keats or Shelley themselves. And, whereas those authors’ words were ‘whispered’ to readers in books, today the musical versions carry the phrase to audiences everywhere. In each of these genres the phrase conveys different emotions: melancholy in country songs, mystery in hard rock, freedom in New Age music. Thus today the phrase is interpreted largely by the media of popular culture, rather than by literature itself. Trying to follow the purely literary origins of this phrase would be to ignore the river in order to seek out the spring that supplies it. The river itself is where the phrase is living today.
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