Inspirational Quotes on Pride

“The proud are ever most provoked by pride.”

“And what else is the cause of all transgression, but that man's ignorant pride will have his will preferred to the will of God.”

“You can have no greater sign of confirmed pride than when you think you are humble enough.”

“We are looking for our own virtue, our own piety, our own goodness, and so live on and in our own poverty and weakness - today pleased and comforted with the seeming firmness and strength of our own pious tempers and fancying ourselves to be somewhat. Tomorrow, fallen into our own mire, we are dejected, but not humbled; we grieve, but it is only the grief of pride at the seeing our perfection not to be such as we had vainly imagined. And thus it will be, till the whole turn of our minds be so changed that we as fully see and know our inability to have any goodness of our own as to have a life of our own.”

“And yet we are very apt to be full of ourselves, instead of Him that made what we so much value, and but for whom we can have no reason to value ourselves.”

“The whitest robes, unless their purity be preserved by divine grace, will be defiled by the blackest spots.”

“Confession is the giving up of ALL self-righteousness.”

“The ways of the world exalt themselves against God. They sometimes look rational and appealing to the most ernest disciple but Christ says to us then what He said to His disciples long ago, when many of them had given u pin disgust, "Do you also want to leave me?" If we answer as PEter did, "Lord to whom else shall we go? Your words are words of eternal life," our rebel thoughts are captured once more. The way of holiness is again visible.”

“Prophet of evil,' he cried, 'never have you said a word to my advantage. It is always trouble that you revel in foretelling.”

“Zeus the Thunderer in his own person and with all solemnity made me certain promises. These you tell me to forget; and instead you would have me base my actions on the flight of birds, winged creatures who do not interest me at all - in fact I do not care whether they fly to the right towards the morning sun or to the left into the western gloom.”

“However, what is done is better left alone, though we resent it still, and we must curb our hearts perforce...as for my death, when Zeus and the other deathless gods appoint it, let it come.”

“No good ever comes of pride, for it is the meanest of mean things, and no one but he who is full of it thinks it grand.”

“The well-meaning woman was in fact possessed by two devils--the one the stiff-necked devil of pride, the other the condescending devil of benevolence. She was kind, but she must have credit for it”

“He had the fault of thinking too well of himself--which who has not who thinks of himself at all, apart from his relation to the holy force of life, within yet beyond him? It was the almost unconscious, assuredly the undetected, self-approbation of the ordinarily righteous man, the defect of whose righteousness makes him regard himself as upright, but the virtue of whose uprightness will at length disclose to his astonished view how immeasurably short of rectitude he comes. At the age of thirty, Godfrey Wardour had not yet become so displeased with himself as to turn self-roused energy upon betterment; and until then all growth must be of doubtful result. … His friends notwithstanding gave him credit for great imperturbability; but in such willfully undemonstrative men the evil burrows the more insidiously that it is masked by a constrained exterior.”

“I was now somewhat reformed in my outward conduct, but the 'renewing in the spirit of my mind', if begun, was scarcely discernible. As my life was externally less wicked and ungodly, my heart grew most proud; the idol self was the object of my adoration and obeisance; my worldly advancement was more eagerly sought than ever; some flattering prospects seemed to open, and I resolved to improve my advantages to the uttermost.”

“His [John Newton's] letters and my answers are now by me; and on a careful perusal of them, compared with all I can recollect concerning this matter, I give this as a faithful account of the correspondence. His letters will, I hope, shortly be made public, being such as promise greater advantage to others, than, through my proud, contentious spirit, I experienced from them. Mine deserve only to be forgotten, except as they are useful to me to remind me what I was, and to mortify my pride; as they illustrate my friend's patience and candour in so long bearing with my ignorance and arrogance; and notwithstanding my unteachable, quarrelsome temper, continuing his benevolent labours for my good; and especially as they remind me of the goodness of God, who, though he abominates and resists the proud, yet knows how to bring down the stout heart, not only by the iron rod of his wrath, but by the golden sceptre of his grace.”

“...the gospel has an answer to both pride and guilt.”

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

“Yes, I know one doesn’t even want to be cured of one’s pride because it gives pleasure. But the pleasure of pride is like the pleasure of scratching. If there is an itch, one does want to scratch: but it is much nicer to have neither the itch nor the scratch. As long as we have the itch of self-regard we shall want the pleasure of self-approval; but the happiest moments are those when we forget our precious selves and have neither, but have everything else (God, our fellow-humans, animals, the garden, and the sky) instead.”

“One subtle arena of attack is in the area of pride. Praying people can become prideful about their praying. Non-participants can become prideful in their resistance. The enemy seeks to divide and conquer every initiative of prayer.”