Vanity not only distances us from God: it makes us look ridiculous.
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.
The market-place, the eager love of gain,
Whose aim is vanity, and whose end is pain!
Where doth the world thrust forth a vanity—
* * * * * *
That is not quickly buzz'd into his ears?
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
She bears a duke's revenues on her back,
And in her heart she scorns our poverty.
He is so plaguy proud that the death tokens of it
Cry "No recovery."
Ay, do despise me! I'm the prouder for it; I like to be despised.
The vanity of others is only counter to our taste when it is counter to our vanity.
Here files of pins extend their shining rows,
Puffs, powders, patches, bibles, billet-doux.
Light vanity, insatiate cormorant,
Consuming means, soon preys upon itself.
Pride, where Wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
Pride, like hooded hawks, in darkness soars,
From blindness bold, and towering to the skies.
By ignorance is pride increased;
They most assume who know the least.