What are your thoughts on this quote?

Question

"Do not judge and you will never be mistaken."

-- Jean Jacques Rousseau

Your kind and respectful thoughts, please?

Answer 1

you know, even with those who commit heinous acts, there is a human behind the horror.
Not any one of us can actually walk in anothers shoes, see their soul, know their heart.

That is why tolerance and allowance are so valuable - you will never fully know who you are looking at, because you cannot fully see them.

Buddhists consider compassion to be a super normal power - humans must develop themselves to grasp it.

Answer 2

It is human nature, or so it appears, to "judge" in a subjective manner. Instead of seeing things as they actually are, we see them as we think they are as we want them to be.

Sciences teaches us that nothing is really solid. There are spaces between the molelecuar particles, the atomic particles, sub atomic and so on. Things, like rocks, as an example, appear "solid, and a judgement is made on apearance.

One might also ponder judgements make about themselves. Who has not seen a man or woman with a poor sense of self able to see only his or her physical or emotional / psychological "flaws", flaws that the majority of others don't notice even after the same has been pointed out.

Humans also have a tendency to judge the "correctness of being", that is whether a person, place or thing is "good" or "bad". The reality sems to be that no thing, whether seen as person, place or thing is good or bad. They simply "are". They exist as they exist and they do what they do. A snake, a spider, car, a flower, the weather and/or a person, as exapmles, are not good or bad. They are what they are. A spider does what a spider does and nothing more. So does a snake, a car, a flower, the weather and/or a person. We may have a preferrence that they behave differently or that they were different however, the reality is they are what they are.

When we each pass what are our judgements, we are often in error regarding the reality of the true nature of existance and thereby mistaken regarding that reality.

We also make mistakes in seeing ourselves as separate from others and from all else that exist. The scientific reality is that we are all made of the same second generation star material of which all things that exist are composed. In our view of our separateness, we also often forget our interdependence in conjunction with all that exist. We are not "other", we are "one". What we do to ourselves, to another and to the environment effects not only the area we have interacted with, it effects everything and all things. As an example, think of "second hand smoke", or pollution of any kind. In a more personal level, think of the effects of one's anger and how it can have a ripple effect that not only effects others but the effects of which can last for an indefinite period of time.

If one were to suspend his or her judgements, having learned to see reality and existance for what is it without attatchements and desires, especially for it to be other than what it is, as is taught by the life philosophy of Buddhism, we would see nothing good or bad, only what "is".

The quote seems very accurate. However, this one may be in error in this judgement.

May it all be well with you.

Answer 3

Hi Kallan,

You asked about the quote: "Do not judge and you will never be mistaken."

It's certainly true, but I don't think practical. Human beings by our very nature need to sift through a daily barrage of information. We do this by making snap judgments. Yes, we should all try to not judge someone without really knowing more about them, their background, their intelligence, what they might have meant, etc. but in the venue of R&S where all we have our some words on a screen, that's not always possible. That said, we should all try to give people the benefit of the doubt and not assume the worst about them.

The reason we judge others is complicated. Tom Peter's said “we are drowning in information and starved for knowledge”, and well stereotypes are a real time saver. This is a part of human nature, otherwise we'd all suffer from infomation overload.

The tendency of the casual mind is to pick out or stumble across a sample which supports or defies its prejudices, and then to make it representative of a whole class.
— Walter Lippman

Stereotypes are the mind’s shorthand for dealing with complexities. They have two aspects: they are much blunter than reality; they are shaped to fit a man’s preferences or prejudgments. Thus two principles are involved: differentiation or its lack, and biased preferential perception.
— Robert E. Lane

Each person paints their picture of reality with a brush dipped in the pigments of the past.
— Jerry Andrus

Everyone takes the limits of his own vision for the limits of the world.
— Arthur Schopenhauer

All the time we are aware of millions of things around us--these changing shapes, these burning hills, the sound of the engine, the feel of the throttle, each rock and weed and fence post and piece of debris beside the road--aware of these things but not really conscious of them unless there is something unusual or unless they reflect something we are predisposed to see. We could not possibly be conscious of these things and remember all of them because our mind would be so full of useless details we would be unable to think. From all this awareness we must select, and what we select and call consciousness is never the same as the awareness because the process of selection mutates it. We take a handful of sand from the endless landscape of awareness around us and call that handful of sand the world.
— Robert Pirsig, (Zen & Art Of Motorcycle Maintenance; p.69)

The effectiveness of our memory banks is determined not by the total number of facts we take in, but the number we wish to reject.
— Jon Wynne-Tyson

There are too many ideas and things and people. Too many directions to go. I was starting to believe the reason it matters to care passionately about something is that it whittles the world down to a more manageable size.
— The movie: “Adaptations” 2003.

Most people falsely assume that they are in touch with reality in its true form, what they don’t realize is that the very process of interpreting reality alters it in some way.
— Me

Everyone is a prisoner of his own experiences. No one can eliminate prejudices – just recognize them.
— Edward R Murrow

Prejudgments become prejudices only if they are not reversible when exposed to new knowledge.
— Gordon W.

A man should look for what is, and not for what he thinks should be.
— Albert Einstein

We must train ourselves not to see the world only through our own eyes.
— Michael Levine

We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are
— Old Talmudic saying

Reality is merely an illusion, albeit a very persistent one.
— Albert Einstein

Enlightenment is illusion-free reality.
— Buddha, [Siddhartha Gautama] (?563-?483 B.C.E.)

Answer 4

If it means:

"Do not judge people and you will never be mistaken about your judgments,"

then yes.

On the other hand, it could be used as a way of avoiding thought, of avoiding a pursuit of the truth, of avoiding proper logical analysis of claims, etc.

It has its time and place.

Edit: As someone else did mention, if you're busy judging, you have no time to love. An equally good thought.

Answer 5

Generally I like it. As with all things, it can be taken too far. We have to make judgments about peoples characters all the time. It's just part of living. The trick is to make judgments without being judgmental.

Answer 6

there are limit for that.
2 Cor 2 :15.

Answer 7

The vast majority of the time, true. In the case of rapists and pedophiles, I'm pretty sure my judgement will be accurate.

Answer 8

I like it very much
another of my favs along the same line

If you judge people you have no time to love them.
- Mother Theresa

Answer 9

A nice thought.

Answer 10

O K I will not judge you so long as you refrain from stepping on my foot. After that, we will see.