Pride

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

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

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

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.

 

The greater man the greater courtesy.

Discouragement is simply the despair of wounded self-love.

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

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

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

Kind hearts are more than coronets,

 

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

 

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

 

I am better than my reputation.

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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