The more a man knows, the more willing he is to learn. The less a man knows, the more positive he is that he knows everything…

Some who are far from atheists, may make themselves merry with that conceit of thousands of spirits dancing at once upon a needle’s point.

I Am In Love With Myself, With My Heart.

Nor is it the spirit of those Christians – alas, they are many – whose ambition in life seems limited to building a nice middle-class Christian home, and making nice middle-class Christian friends, and bringing up their children in nice middle-class Christian ways, and who leave the sub-middle-class sections of the community, Christian and non-Christian,...

We measure everything by ourselves with almost a necessary conceit.

I was accused of always acting superior. Always means being, not acting.

I overreacted to praise, signing an autograph. I’d write a check to buy it back.

Oh, I’m good. Seriously, after all these years, you’d think I would stop amazing myself. But here I am, still doing it.

People who do not know how to laugh are always pompous and self-conceited.

Consider an achievement accidental if it is not coupled with modesty. Because if the achiever had endeavoured for it, it would certainly have killed their pride.

A session of boasting won’t attract any real friends. It will set you up on a pedestal, however, making you a clearer target.

Just because you’re beautiful and perfect, it’s made you conceited.

If pride really went before a fall, then, Lucifer is the inventor of pride.

There is a deep and perennial and profoundly human impulse to approach the world with a DEMAND, to approach the world with a PRECONDITION, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE CENTER OF THE UNIVERSE, that what has got to turn out to lie at THE FOUNDATION OF ALL BEING, is...

Do you wish to speak in Provençal, French, or Latin? They are all I can manage, I’m afraid.””Any will do,” the rabbi replied in Provençal.”Splendid. Latin it is,” said Pope Clement.

Actually, writers have no business writing about their own works. They either wax conceited, saying things like: ‘My brilliance is possibly most apparent in my dazzling short story, “The Cookiepants Hypotenuse.”‘ Or else they get unbearably cutesy: ‘My cat Ootsywootums has given me all my best ideas, hasn’t oo, squeezums?

I just believe that someday I’ll meet a person who’d describe me from the side as thoroughly and eloquently as I can do it.

An ordinary man gets arrogant with beauty, conceited with knowledge and ruthless with power.

Self-conceit may lead to self destruction.

Narcissus does not fall in love with his reflection because it is beautiful, but because it is his. If it were his beauty that enthralled him, he would be set free in a few years by its fading.

He wondered fleetingly how many people who sat alone for hours as they scribbled their stories practiced talking about their work during their coffee breaks….

Do you really think that God in his heaven with all the angels, there from the beginning of time and looking towards the day of judgement day, really looks down on all the world and see’s you and little harry and says ‘whatever you choose to do is my will?’ “Yes i do.” she says...

That melting pot stuff was always more about what this country wanted to believe about itself than the way people really felt.

Social media has infected the world with a sickening virus called vanity.

Why did you come in to-night with your heads in the air? ‘Make way, we are coming! Give us every right and don’t you dare breathe a word before us. Pay us every sort of respect, such as no one’s ever heard of, and we shall treat you worse than the lowest lackey!’ They strive...

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Having a purpose is the little secret of the nonpretties. Something to do always beats something to look at.

Those who serve the True Guru are very beautiful; they cast off the filth of selfishness and conceit.

I’m Dylan. I’m so cool. I want to date myself, but I don’t know how! You want to date me instead? You’re so lucky!

It hurt to think that a boy would not have him at his value of himself.

The only time I’ve ever learned anything from a review was when John Lanchester wrote a piece in the Guardian about my second novel, The Heather Blazing. He said that, together with the previous novel, it represented a diptych about the aftermath of Irish independence. I simply hadn’t known that – and I loved the...

She would be one of those who kneel to their own shadows till feet grow on their knees; then go down on their hands till their hands grow into feet; then lay their faces on the ground till they grow into snouts; when at last they are a hideous sort of lizards, each of which...

What honest boy would pride himself on not picking pockets ? A thief who was trying to reform would. To be conceited of doing one’s duty is then a sign of how little one does it, and how little one sees what a contemptible thing it is not to do it. Could any but a...

Two times twice now, I have been called arrogant, by the decadent.I’d rather be overly self confident, rather than overly self indulgent.

Premature independence is the daughter of conceit.

Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit.

Arrogance is perhaps the most socially acceptable form of sin in the church today. In this culture of abundance, one of the only ways Satan can keep Christians neutralized is to wrap us up in pride. Conceit slips in like drafts of cold air in the winter. We don’t see it, but outsiders can sense...

The prince’s official job description as king will be ‘defender of the faith,’ which currently means the state-financed absurdity of the Anglican Church, but he has more than once said publicly that he wants to be anointed as defender of all faiths—another indication of the amazing conceit he has developed in six decades of performing...

The smaller the mind the greater the conceit.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

It is possible to have a strong self-love without any self-satisfaction, rather with a self-discontent which is the more intense because one’s own little core of egoistic sensibility is a supreme care.

He who is enamored of himself will at least have the advantage of being inconvenienced by few rivals.

Time and time again does the pride of man influence his very own fall. While denying it, one gradually starts to believe that he is the authority, or that he possesses great moral dominion over others, yet it is spiritually unwarranted. By that point he loses steam; in result, he falsely begins trying to prove...

There’s something ugly about a pretty boy who knows he’s pretty and assumes everyone else know it too.

National boundaries are not evident when we view the Earth from space. Fanatical ethnic or religious or national chauvinisms are a little difficult to maintain when we see our planet as a fragile blue crescent fading to become an inconspicuous point of light against the bastion and citadel of the stars.

In contrast to your usual minions, I imagine, I’m a bit more awed by your conceit and arrogance than I am by your supposed magnificence.

How thoroughly the chimps and bonobos have erased the list of purported human distinctions!-self-awareness, language, ideas and their association, reason, trade, play, choice, courage, love and altruism, laughter, concealed ovulation, kissing, face-to-face sex, female orgasm, division of labor, cannibalism, art, music, politics, and featherless bipedalism, besides tool using, tool making, and much else. Philosophers and...

The smaller the mind the greater the conceit