This site is dedicated to the memory of Dr. Alan William Smolowe who gave birth to the creation of this database.
"How can there be pride in a contrite heart? Humility is the earliest fruit of religion." - Hosea Ballou
"There is a paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from being so." - James Bryant Conant
"The whole family of pride and ignorance are incestuous and mutually beget each other." - James Bryant Conant
"Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repel." - James Bryant Conant
"Pride, like the magnet, constantly points to one object, self; but, unlike the magnet, it has no attractive pole, but at all points repels." - James Bryant Conant
"Pride requires very costly food - its keeper’s happiness." - James Bryant Conant
"Ladies of fashion starve their happiness to feed their vanity, and their love to feed their pride." - James Bryant Conant
"Pride goes before ruin, arrogance, before failure." - Jewish Proverbs
"The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell." - John Foster, fully John Watson Foster
"In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes." - John Ruskin
"All other passions do occasional good; but when pride puts in its word everything goes wrong." - John Ruskin
"I would have every zealous man examine his heart thoroughly, and I believe he will often find that what he calls a zeal for his religion is either pride, interest, or ill-repute." - Joseph Addison
"Riches expose a man to pride and luxury, and a foolish elation of heart." - Joseph Addison
"Generosity is giving more than you can; pride is taking less than you need." - Kahlil Gibran
"Nothing about his life is more strange to [man] or more unaccountable in purely mundane terms than the stirrings he finds in himself, usually fitful but sometimes overwhelming, to look beyond his animal existence and not be fully satisfied with its immediate substance. He lacks the complacency of the other animals: he is obsessed by pride and guilt, pride at being something more than a mere animal, built at falling short of the high aims he sets for himself." - Lewis Mumford
"Wrongs are often forgiven, but contempt never is. Our pride remembers it forever. It implies a discovery of weaknesses, which we are much more careful to conceal than crimes." - Lord Chesterfield, Philip Dormer Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield
"Life is what we are alive to. It is not length, but breadth. To be alive only to appetite, pleasure, pride, money-making, and not to goodness and kindness, purity and love, history, poetry, music, flowers, stars, God and eternal hopes, it is to be all but dead." - Maltbie Babcock, fully Maltbie Davenport Babcock
"In prosperity let us most carefully avoid pride, disdain, and arrogance." - Cicero, fully Marcus Tullius Cicero, anglicized as Tully NULL
"The humility of hypocrites is, of all pride, the greatest and most haughty." - Martin Luther
"Where wealth is, there are also all manner of sins; for through wealth comes pride, through pride dissension, through dissension wars, through wars, poverty, through poverty, great distress and misery. Therefore, they that are rich, must yield a strict and great account; for to whom much is given, of him much will be required." - Martin Luther
"The need of the city is to accelerate growth; the pride of the small town is to retard it." - Norman Mailer, fully Norman Kingsley Mailer
"The same stream of life that runs through my veins night and day runs through the world and dances in rhythmic measures. It is the same life that shoots in joy through the dust of the earth in numberless blades of grass and breaks into tumultuous waves of leaves and flowers. It is the same life that is rocked in the ocean-cradle of birth and of death, in ebb and in flow. I feel my limbs made glorious by the touch of this world of life. And my pride is from the life-throb of ages dancing in my blood this moment." -
"Pride eradicates all vices but itself." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The virtues are economists, but some of the vices are also. Thus, next to humility, I have noticed that pride is a pretty good husband." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Not in nature but in man is all the beauty and worth he sees. The world is very empty, and is indebted to this gilding, exalting soul for all its pride." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"The peril of every fine faculty is the delight of playing with it for pride. Talent is commonly developed at the expense of character, and the greater it grows, the more is the mischief. Talent is mistaken for genius, a dogma or system for truth, ambition for greatest, ingenuity for poetry, sensuality for art." - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"I laugh at the lore and the pride of man, At the sophist schools and their learned clan; For what are they all, in their high conceit, When man in the bush with God may meet?" - Ralph Waldo Emerson
"Temperance, that virtue without pride, and fortune without envy, that gives indolence of body with an equality of mind; the best guardian of youth and support of old age; the precept of reason as well as religion, and physician of the soul as well as the body; the tutelary goddess of health and universal medicine of life." - William Temple, fully Sir William Temple, 1st Baronet
"Anger is rooted in our lack of understanding of ourselves and of the causes, deep-seated as well as immediate, that brought about this unpleasant state of affairs. Anger is also rooted in desire, pride, agitation and suspicion. The primary roots of our anger are in ourselves. Our environment and other people are only secondary. It is not difficult for us to accept the enormous damage brought abut by a natural disaster, such as an earthquake or a flood. But when damage is caused by another person, we don’t have much patience. We know that earthquakes and floods have causes, and we should see that the person who has precipitated our anger also has reasons, deep-seated and immediate, for what he has done." - Thich Nhất Hanh
"Pride, perceiving Humility honourable, often borrows her Cloak." - Thomas Fuller
"Envy is the most universal passion. We only pride ourselves on the qualities owe possess, or think we possess; but we envy the pretensions we have, and those which we have not, and do not even wish for. We envy the greatest qualities and every trifling advantage. We envy the most ridiculous appearance or affectation of superiority. We envy folly and conceit; nay, we go so far as to envy whatever confers distinction of notoriety, even vice and infamy." - William Hazlitt
"Unlimited power is helpless, as arbitrary power is capricious. Our energy is in proportion t the resistance it meets. We can attempt nothing great but from a sense of the difficulties we have to encounter; we can persevere in nothing great but from a pride in overcoming them." - William Hazlitt
"Violence ever defeats its own ends. Where you cannot drive you can always persuade. A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles. There is a secret pride in every human heart that revolts at tyranny. You may order and drive an individual, but you cannot make him respect you." - William Hazlitt
"Religion in the hands of the self, or corrupt nature, serves only to discover vices of a worse kind than in nature left to itself. Hence are all the disorderly passions of religious men, which burn in a worse flame than passions only employed about worldly matters; pride, self-exaltation, hatred and persecution, under a cloak of religious zeal, will sanctify actions which nature, left to itself, would be ashamed to own." - William Law
"Reserve may be pride fortified in ice; dignity is worth reposing on truth." - William Rounseville Alger
"Painful and corporeal punishments should never be applied to fanaticism; for, being founded on pride, it glories in persecution." - Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana
"We are in the grip of a scientific materialism, caught in a vicious cycle where our security today seems to depend on regimentation and weapons which will ruin us tomorrow… the intellectual achievements of great scientists are being perverted by the material exploitation of industry and war…I have lived to experience the early results of scientific materialism… have watched pride of workmanship leave and human character decline as efficiency of production lines increased… I have seen the science I worshipped and the aircraft I loved destroying the civilization I expected them to save." - Charles Lindbergh, fully Charles Augustus Lindbergh, nicknamed "Slim,""Lucky Lindy" and "The Lone Eagle"
"The noblest character is stained by the addition of pride." - Claudian, latin Claudius Claudianus NULL
"It is pride which has been the chief cause of misery in every nation and every family since the world began." - C. S. Lewis, fully Clive Staples "C.S." Lewis, called "Jack" by his family
"When dealing with people, let us remember we are not dealing with creatures of logic. We are dealing with creatures of emotion, creatures bristling with prejudices and motivated by pride and vanity. " - Dale Carnegie, originally spelled Dale Carnegey
"Nobody can stand truth if it is told to him. Truth can be tolerated only if you discover it yourself because then, the pride of discovery makes the truth palatable." - Fritz Perls, fully Friedrich "Fritz" (Frederick) Salomon Perls
"One of the sources of pride in being a human being is the ability to bear present frustrations in the interests of longer purposes." - Helen Merrell Lynd
"Time disappears into outer action or inner impulses. Into doings, cravings, or dreamings. But human time is conscious time. And this has been lost, destroyed. In its place there is now animal time (doing, moving about, preying on others, eating, building, killing, etc. ); plant time (dreaming, languishing, imagining); or “mineral” — that is, mechanical — time: the time of devices such as clocks and computers. What we call logical thinking is often just an internal version of these lifeless machines. Implicitly, we even take pride in the mechanicity of our thinking when, forgetting the metaphorical origin of the usage, we refer to a computer’s “intelligence.” This is mental time, “mineral” in its rigidity and sterility. We lay this logical cement over organic life out there and in ourselves. Carried to its extreme, this becomes the mindset that measures the whole of human life solely by the “bottom line." - Jacob Needleman