It is difficult for a man to speak long of himself without vanity; therefore I shall be short.
Pride Quotes
Shakespeare leads, with Pope, John Calvin, Nietzsche and Benjamin Franklin behind him. Samuel Johnson, in The Rambler (1750), is here for a different kind of pride: no place affords a more striking conviction of the vanity of human hopes than a public library. Wordsworth has two passages quoted in Bartlett’s, one on never blending our pleasure or our pride with the sorrow of the meanest thing that feels, the other on the fuming vanities of earth.
“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels” is credited to Augustine of Hippo and is disputed. The notes trace it to a medieval collection compiled around 1306 and to a Victorian anthology. It is the only entry on the page with a flag.
Never to blend our pleasure or our pride
With sorrow of the meanest thing that feels.
There was never yet fair woman but she made mouths in a glass.
They are proud in humility, proud in that they are not proud.
Pride in their port, defiance in their eye,
I see the lords of humankind pass by.
We rise in glory, as we sink in pride:
Where boasting ends, there dignity begins.