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exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity

Pride

"Nearly all men can stand adversity, but if you want to test a man's character, give him power." Abraham Lincoln

Editor's 1-Minute Essay: Pride

Ben Franklin: “Pride is as loud a beggar as want and a great deal more saucy.”    

C.S. Lewis: “A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.”    

Voltaire: “We are rarely proud when we are alone.”

Soren Kierkegaard: “The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.”

C.S. Lewis: “Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.”    

Ann Landers: “Don't accept your dog's admiration as conclusive evidence that you are wonderful.”

Emily Bronte: “Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.”   

Baruch Spinoza: “Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.”

Sophocles, Antigone: “All men make mistakes, but a good man yields when he knows his course is wrong, and repairs the evil. The only crime is pride.”

Carl Jung: “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.”   

T. S. Eliot: “Most of the trouble in the world is caused by people wanting to be important.”   

Johann Lavater: “Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.”    

Henry Cloud: “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.”

John Ruskin: “In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.”

Andrew Murray: “Pride must die in you, or nothing of heaven can live in you.”

Robert Fulghum: “Ignorance and power and pride are a deadly mixture, you know.”

Ezra Taft Benson: “The proud wish God would agree with them. They are not interested in changing their opinions to agree with God's.”

Francois de la Rochefoucauld: “He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.”

Thomas Jefferson: “Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.”

Vincent de Paul: “Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.”

Franois de la Rochefoucauld: “It is more often from 'pride' than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last.”  

Alexander Pope: “In pride, in reasoning pride, our error lies; All quit their sphere and rush into the skies. Pride still is aiming at the bless'd abodes, Men would be angels, angels would be gods.”

Fulton J. Sheen: “Pride is an admission of weakness; it secretly fears all competition and dreads all rivals.”

Voltaire: “The infinitely little have a pride infinitely great.”   

John C. Maxwell: “There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. 'Good pride' represents our dignity and self-respect. 'Bad pride' is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance.” 

Joyce Meyer: “Pride is an independent, me-oriented spirit. It makes people arrogant, rude and hard to get along with. When our heart is prideful, we don't give God the credit and we mistreat people, looking down on them and thinking we deserve what we have.”  

Henry Rollins: “I have come to the conclusion that it's a waste of time to have too much pride in anything. Perhaps it's good to have a sense of duty, a jealous zeal to protect or improve, but pride ultimately is only that which stands vulnerable to offense and degradation.”    

Ezra Taft Benson: “Pride adversely affects all our relationships - our relationship with God and His servants, between husband and wife, parent and child, employer and employee, teacher and student, and all mankind.”   

John C. Maxwell: “When you are full of pride on the inside, it makes you stiff, stubborn, and creates strife with others.”

William Shakespeare, Troilus and Cressida: “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.”

Henry Ward Beecher: “Pride slays thanksgiving, but a humble mind is the soil out of which thanks naturally grow. A proud man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.”

John C. Maxwell: “Pride deafens us to the advice or warnings of those around us… Leaders who fail to prune their pride will meet demise. That's not a guess, it's a guarantee. With pride, it's not a matter of 'if' we will fall, but 'when.' There are no exceptions.”

Robert Hunter: “In wickedness of pride is lost the light to understand how little grace is earned and how much given.”

A.W. Tozer: “As long as you set yourself up as a little god to which you must be loyal there will be those who will delight to offer affront to your idol.”