Pride

Of all the sources of human pride, mere wealth is the basest and most vulgar-minded. Real gentlemen are almost invariably above this low feeling.

In America everybody is of the opinion that he has no social superiors, since all men are equal, but he does not admit that he has no social inferiors, for, from the time of Jefferson onward, the doctrine that all men are equal applies only upwards, not downwards.

Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.

It is the privilege of greatness to confer intense happiness with insignificant gifts.

Failure is the true test of greatness.

True greatness is free, kind, familiar, and popular; it lets itself be touched and handled, it loses nothing by being seen at close quarters; the better one knows it, the more one admires it.

Greatness is a road that leads toward something unknown.

To be great is to be misunderstood.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

A show of envy is an insult to oneself.

What is it that confers the noblest delight? What is that which swells a man’s breast with pride above that which any other experience can bring to him? Discovery!

Years are only garments, and you either wear them with style all your life, or else you go dowdy to the grave.

Virtue would not go nearly so far if vanity did not keep her company.

Everyone has his vanity, and each one’s vanity is his forgetting that there are others with an equal soul.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

The most violent passions sometimes leave us at rest, but vanity agitates us constantly.

Vanity plays lurid tricks with our memory.

Vanity working on a weak head produces every sort of mischief.

Nothing is so agonizing to the fine skin of vanity as the application of a rough truth!

A desire to be observed, considered, esteemed, praised, beloved, and admired by his fellows is one of the earliest as well as the keenest dispositions discovered in the heart of man.

Shall a man go and hang himself because he belongs to the race of pygmies, and not be the biggest pygmy that he can?

No estimate is more in danger of erroneous calculation than those by which a man computes the force of his own genius.

To be apt in quotation is a splendid and dangerous gift. Splendid, because it ornaments a man’s speech with other men’s jewels; dangerous, for the same reason.

Nothing is so at odds with prayer as vanity.