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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.

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Most quoted on pride:

The expression of vanity and self-love becomes less offensive, when it retains something of simplicity and frankness.

Alexander von Humboldt Equinoctial Regions of America (1814)

Vanity is the real lever with which Archimedes said he could move the earth;...

Letitia Elizabeth Landon Ethel Churchill (1837)

Whatever Nature has in worth denied,
She gives in large recruits of needful Pride.

Alexander Pope An Essay on Criticism (1709)

Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.

Solomon

Asceticism is the trifling of an enthusiast with his power, a puerile coquetting with his selfishness or his vanity, in the absence of any sufficiently great object to employ the first or overcome the last.

Florence Nightingale

Prayer must be humble: God resists the proud, but gives grace to the humble. Here St. James tells us that God does not listen to the prayers of the proud, but resists them; while, on the other hand, he is always ready to hear the prayers of the humble.

Alphonsus Liguori

What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.

François de La Rochefoucauld Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665)

Pride is the constant enemy of love.

Anna de Noailles Poéme de l'amour (1924)

Too much tail. All that jewelry weighs it down. Like vanity. Can't nobody fly with all that shit. Wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.

Toni Morrison Song of Solomon (1977)

By mortifying vanity we do ourselves no good. It is the want of interest in our life which produces it; by filling up that want of interest in our life we can alone remedy it.

Florence Nightingale Cassandra (1860)

"Vanitas vanitatum" has rung in the ears
Of gentle and simple for thousands of years;
The wail still is heard, yet its notes never scare
Either simple or gentle from Vanity Fair.

Frederick Locker-Lampson

Pride and resentment are not indigenous in the human heart; and perhaps it is due to the gardener's innate love of the exotic that we take such pains to make them thrive.

Hope Mirrlees Lud-in-the-Mist (1926)

I think that Bush has alienated every friend that we've made over the last 200 years with his arrogance and indifference.

Charles B. Rangel

That was the source of my vanity and my cowardice: always I believed everyone was watching me.

Andre Dubus

Pride, when permitted full sway, is the great undying cankerworm which gnaws the very vitals of a man's worldly possessions, let them be small or great, hundreds or millions.

P. T. Barnum

He that is proud eats up himself: pride is his own glass, his own trumpet, his own chronicle; and whatever praises itself but in the deed, devours the deed in the praise.

William Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (1602)

Sinners, remember this: It is not so much the sense of your unworthiness as your pride that keeps you from a blessed closing with the Saviour.

Thomas Brooks

Our vanity would have just that which we do best count as that which is hardest for us. The origin of many a morality.

Friedrich Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Why, who cries out on pride,
That can therein tax any private party?
Doth it not flow as hugely as the sea.

William Shakespeare

In our complex industrial civilization of today the peace of righteousness and justice, the only kind of peace worth having, is at least as necessary in the industrial world as it is among nations.

Theodore Roosevelt Nobel lecture (1910)

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