Of all the causes which conspire to blind Man's erring judgement, and misguide the mind, What the weak head with strongest bias rules, Is PRIDE, the never-failing vice of fools.
OBLIVION, n. Cold storage for high hopes. A place where ambitious authors meet their works without pride and their betters without envy. A dormitory without an alarm clock.
Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.
To acknowledge our faults when we are blamed, is modesty; to discover them to one's friends in ingenuousness, is confidence; but to preach them to all the world, if one does not take care, is pride.
The strong individual loves the earth so much he lusts for recurrence. He can smile in the face of the most terrible thought: meaningless, aimless existence recurring eternally. The second characteristic of such a man is that he has the strength to recognize - and to live with the recognition - that the world is valueless in itself and that all values are human ones. He creates himself by fashioning his own values; he has the pride to live by the values he wills.
The spirit of God, like the sun, always gives all its light at once. The spirit of man resembles the pale moon, which has its phases, its absences and its returns, its lucidity and its spots, its fullness and its disappearance, which borrows all its light from the rays of the sun, and which still dares to intercept them on occasion.
One who is publicly honest about himself ends up by priding himself somewhat on this honesty: for he knows only too well why he is honest-for the same reasons another person prefers illusion and dissimulation.
A society that feels life is the most precious thing [jars against] a society that prefers death over theft, over loss of pride, over inconvenience, and so much else.
One way leads to acquisition, the other leads to nirvana. Realising this a monk should take no pleasure in the respect of others, but should devote himself to solitude.
She is tolerable, but not handsome enough to tempt me, and I am in no humor at present to give consequence to young ladies who are slighted by other men.