Quotes about pride

[T]hey always think they can improve upon nature and mend what God has made.

Wasn’t being a dilettante the result of an inner conviction that you were too good for routine living?

And stop thinking you’re the superior ones! You’re just another drop in our gene pool! We’re all descended from peoples who thought they were kings and gods and who found themselves to be almost nothing at all in the end. Don’t let that be you.

Don’t you start. It’s bad enough that one of us feels he could have done more. We’re human, Campion—that’s all it boils down to. Human and not nearly as clever as we thought we were when it counted. End of story. When they put up the gravestone for our species, that’ll be the epitaph.

It was easy to sound that confident; less easy to believe it in his heart. They had got this far did not give them an automatic guarantee of success. The world did not work like that. It took pleasure in punishing the cocksure.

Don’t overestimate your familiarity with technologies you barely understand. It could be your undoing.

You will go to any length, however sumptuous or cataclysmic, in order solely to avoid the words: it appears I am at fault.

Aristocracy is not an institution: aristocracy is a sin; generally a very venial one. It is merely the drift or slide of men into a sort of natural pomposity and praise of the powerful, which is the most easy and obvious affair in the world.

The vastness of the universe-and love, the thing that makes the vastness bearable-is out of reach to the arrogant.

If you feel that you are good, don't be too proud of it.

Pride takes such natural possession of us in the midst of our woes, errors, etc. We even lose our life with joy, provided people talk of it.

Epictetus goes much further when he asks: Why do we not lose our temper if someone tells us that we have a headache, while we do lose it if someone says there is anything wrong with our arguments or our choice?