This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"Violent zeal for truth has a hundred to one odds to be either petulancy, ambition, or pride." - Jonathan Swift, pen names, M.B. Drapier, Lemuel Gulliver, Isaac Bickerstaff
"There be four good mothers who have four bad daughters: Truth hath Hatred, Prosperity hath Pride, Security hath Peril, and Familiarity hath Contempt." - Harold W Thompson
"There may be, and there often is, indeed, a regard for ancestry which nourishes only weak pride; as there is also a care for posterity, which only disguises an habitual avarice, or hides the workings of a low and groveling vanity. But there is also a moral and philosophical respect for our ancestors, which elevates the character and improves the heart." - Daniel Webster
"Whatever satisfies souls is true; prudence entirely satisfies the craving and glut of souls, itself only finally satisfies the soul, the soul has that measureless pride which revolts from every lesson but its own." - Walt Whitman, fully Walter "Walt" Whitman
"Charity and good-nature give a sanction to the most common actions; and pride and ill-nature make our best virtues despicable." - William Wycherley
"Pride is a great urge to action; but remember, the pride must be on the part of the buyer. On the part of the seller, it is vanity." - James R. Adams
"Pride hated stands, and doth unpitied." - William Alexander, fully Sir William Alexander, 1st Earl of Stirling
"It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"There is something in humility which, strangely enough, exalts the heart, and something in pride which debases it. This seems, indeed, to be contradictory, that loftiness should debase and lowliness exalt. But pious humility enables us to submit to what is above us; and nothing is more exalted above us than God; and therefore humility, by making us subject to God, exalts us. But pride, being a defect of nature, by the very act of refusing subjection and revolution from Him who is supreme, falls to a low condition." - Saint Augustine, aka Augustine of Hippo, St. Austin, Bishop of Hippo NULL
"Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall." - Bible or The Bible or Holy Bible NULL
"As thou desirest the love of God and man, beware of pride. It is a tumor in the mind, that breaks and ruins all thine actions; a worm in thy treasury, that eats and ruins thine estate. It loves no man, and is beloved of none; it disparages another's virtues by detraction, and thine own vainglory. It is the friend of the flatterer, the mother of envy, the nurse of fury, the sin of devils, and devil of mankind. It hates superiors, scorns inferiors, and owns no equal. In short, till thou hate it, God hate thee." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
"Pride defeats its own end, by bringing the man who seeks esteem and reverence into contempt." - Henry Bolingbroke, Henry IV of England
"In beginning the world, if you don't wish to get chafed at every turn, fold up your pride carefully, and put it under lock and key, and only let it out to air on grand occasions. It is a garment all stiff brocade outside, and all grating sackcloth on the side next to the skin. Even kings do not wear the dalmaticum except at a coronation." - Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton, fully Edward George Earle Lytton Bulwer-Lytton, Lord Lytton
"Books are a guide in youth, and an entertainment for age. They support us under solitude, and keep us from becoming a burden to ourselves. They help us to forget the crossness of men and things, composed our cares and our passions, and lay our disappointments asleep. When we are weary of living, we may repair to the dead, who have nothing of peevishness, pride or design in their conversation." - Jeremy Collier
"The proud are ever most provoked by pride." - William Cowper
"Pride, like ambition, is sometimes virtuous and sometimes vicious, according the character in which it is found, and the object to which it is directed. As a principle, it is the parent of almost every virtue and every vice - everything that pleases and displeases in mankind; and as the effects are so very different, nothing is more easy than to discover, even to ourselves, whether the pride that produces them is virtuous or vicious the first object of virtuous pride is rectitude, and the next independence." - Fulke Greville, 1st Baron Brooke, de jure 13th Baron Latimer and 5th Baron Willoughby de Broke
"Laughter is an integral part of life, one that we could ill afford to lose. If I were asked what single quality every human being needs more than any other, I would answer, the ability to laugh at himself. When we see our own grotesqueries, how droll our ambitions are, how comical we are in almost all respects, we automatically become more sane, less self-centered, more humble, more wholesome. To laugh at ourselves we have to stand outside ourselves - and that is an immense benefit. Our puffed-up pride and touchy self-importance vanish; a clean and sweet humility begins to take possession of us. We are on the way to growing a soul." - Arthur Powell Davies
"Pride the first peer and president of hell." - Daniel Defoe, born Daniel Foe
"Pride, the most dangerous of all faults, proceeds from want of sense, or want of thought." - Clarence Douglas Dillon
"Peace comes only from loving, from mutual self-sacrifice and self-forgetfulness. Few today have humility or wisdom enough to know the world's deep need of love. We are too much possessed by national and racial and cultural pride." - Horace William Baden Donegan
"Do not pride yourself on the few great men who, over the centuries, have been born on your earth through no merit of yours. Reflect, rather, on how you have treated them at the time, and how you have followed their teachings." - Albert Einstein
"What can we take on trust in this uncertain life? Happiness, greatness, pride - nothing is secure, nothing keeps." - Euripedes NULL
"Vanity and pride sustain so close an alliance as to be often mistaken for each other." - William Ewart Gladstone
"Never did poesy appear so full of heaven to me as when I saw how it pierced through pride and fear to the lives of coarsest men." - James Russell Lowell
"Luxury is... absolutely necessary in monarchies; as it is also in despotic states. In the former, it is the use of liberty; in the latter, it is the abuse of servitude. A slave appointed by his master to tyrannize over other wretches of the same condition, uncertain of enjoying tomorrow the blessings of today, has no other felicity that that of glutting the pride, the passions, and the voluptuousness of the present moment." - Baron de Montesquieu, fully Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu
"The meaning of life is to be found in our surroundings and in our relationships... Life is meaningful when we respect the best of tradition while still loving innovation... Life is fulfilling when we marry pride with tolerance, when our deeds and our words are nourished by hope and by realism, when the wisdom of the ages catches the passionate eye of youth. Life on this earth in our time is, above all, a parade of interdependent peoples, interdependent ideas, interdependent solutions. We are all artists of the possible - and dreamers of that which is just now beyond our reach, but may not be tomorrow." - Youssou N’Dour
"In architecture the pride of man, his triumph over gravitation, his will to power, assume a visible form. Architecture is sort of oratory of power by means of forms." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"The Christian faith is a sacrifice: a sacrifice of all freedom, all pride, all self-confidence of the spirit; at the same time, enslavement and self-mockery, self-mutilation." - Friedrich Nietzsche, fully Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
"Pride is both a virtue and a vice." - Joseph Parker
"All nature is but art, unknown to thee; all chance, direction, which thou canst not see; all discord harmony, not understood; all partial evil, universal good: and, spite of pride, in erring reason’s spite, one truth is clear, “Whatever is, is Right.”" - Alexander Pope
"Hell was built on spite, and heav’n on pride." - Alexander Pope
"Astronomy was born of superstition; eloquence of ambition, hatred, falsehood, and flattery; geometry of avarice; physics of an idle curiosity; and even moral philosophy of human pride. Thus the arts and sciences owe their birth to our vices." - Jean-Jacques Rousseau
"To feel oppressed by obligation is only to prove that we are incapable of a proper sentiment of gratitude. To receive favors from the unworthy is to admit that our selfishness is superior to our pride." - William Gilmore Simms
"War mends but few, and spoils multitudes; it legitimates rapine and authorizes murder; and these crimes must be ministered to by their lesser relatives, by covetousness and anger and pride and revenge, and heats of blood, and wilder liberty, and all the evil that can be supposed to come from or run to such cursed causes of mischief." - Jeremy Taylor
"Always in everything let there be reverence; with the deportment grave as when one is thinking (deeply), and with speech composed and definite. This will make the people tranquil. Pride should not be allowed to grow; the desires should not be indulged; the will should not be gratified to the full; pleasure should not be carried to excess." - Book of Li, aka Book of Rites or Record of Rites or Classic Rites NULL
"The basis of society, of any society, is a certain pride in obedience. When this pride no longer exists, the society collapses." - Emil M. Cioran
"Compassion is the root of religion; pride the root of sin." - Tulsidas NULL
"The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim. Conceit and false pride on the part of a nation prevent the rise of remorse for its crime." - Albert Einstein
"There is perhaps no one of the natural passions so hard to subdue as pride. Disguise it, struggle with it, beat it down, stifle it, mortify it as much as one pleases, it is still alive, and will every now and then peep out and show itself." - Benjamin Franklin
"Every man of action has a strong dose of egotism, pride, hardness, and cunning. But all those things will be forgiven him, indeed, they will be regarded as high qualities, if he can make of them the means to achieve great ends." - Charles de Gaulle, fully Charles André Joseph Marie de Gaulle
"He who has enough to satisfy what he wants, and nevertheless ceaselessly labors to acquire riches, either in order to obtain a higher social position, or that subsequently he may have enough to live without labor, or that his sons may become men of wealth and importance - all such are incited by a damnable avarice, sensuality and pride." - Henry of Langenstein NULL