Pride

Nothing is so frequent as to mistake an ordinary human gift for a special and extraordinary endowment.

He suddenly became shy and developed a conceited grin—the grin of the village yokel whose cricket score is mentioned before a stranger.

Character is what you know you are, not what others think you have.

Nothing is more depressing than the conviction that one is not a hero.

[ To a customs official upon arriving in New York in 1882 :] I have nothing to declare but my genius.

Mr. Whistler always spelt art, and we believe still spells it, with a capital “I.”

The greater man the greater courtesy.

I’m pore, I’m black, I may be ugly and can’t cook, a voice say to everything listening. But I’m here.

There is no one so bound to his own face that he does not cherish the hope of presenting another to the world.

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

 

Those who wish to seem learned to fools, seem fools to the learned. .

Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

Many a crown shines spotless now That yet was deeply sullied in the winning.

 

But when I behold a Lump of Deformity, and Diseases both in Body and Mind, smitten with Pride , it immediately breaks all the Measures of my Patience.

The richest monarch in the Christian world; The sun in my own dominions never sets. 3

 

This is one of the compliments that mediocrity pays to those who are not mediocre.

The lion on your old stone gates Is not more cold to you than I.

 

I am better than my reputation.

 

I . . . once read the Old Testament and the four Gospels straight through, from a vainglorious desire to do what nobody else had done.

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

 

The basic essential of a great actor is that he loves himself in acting.

’Tis only noble to be good. Kind hearts are more than coronets, And simple faith than Norman blood.

 

[ Remark, 1925 :] The Jews have produced only three originative geniuses; Christ, Spinoza, and myself.

Then, with that faint fleeting smile playingabout his lips, he faced the firing squad; erect and motionless, proud and disdainful, Walter Mitty, the undefeated, inscrutable to the last.