Pride Sayings and Quotes

Sometimes our greatest enemy is ourselves. Pride and ego can get in the way of making rational decisions. Keep a cool head with the collection of wise and insightful pride quotes below.

Behind every argument lies someone's ignorance.      

Louis D. Brandeis

Once you reach the top, take care as the only way left to go is down.      

Darren Bateman

One man may be more cunning than another, but not more cunning than everybody else.      

Ben Franklin (1706-1790)

Pride is as loud a beggar as want, and a great deal more saucy. When you have bought one fine thing, you must buy ten more, that your appearance may be all of a piece; but it is easier to suppress the first desire than to satisfy all that follow it.     

Benjamin Franklin

The devil wipes his breech with poor folks' pride.      

Benjamin Franklin

The higher you climb, the heavier you fall.      

Vietnamese (on pride)


C.S. Lewis

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.     

C.S. Lewis

We are rarely proud when we are alone.


The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.     

Soren Kierkegaard

Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.     

Emily Bronte

God opposes the proud, but gives grace to the humble.

Holy Bible, James 4:6

Pride is pleasure arising from a man's thinking too highly of himself.

Baruch Spinoza


Carl Jung

Never look down on anybody unless you are helping them up.

Jesse Jackson


T. S. Eliot

Pride is a personal commitment. It is an attitude which separates excellence from mediocrity.     


Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.     

Johann Kaspar Lavater

Pride is the mask of one's own faults.     


In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

John Ruskin

Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts, not to hurt others.

George Eliot, Middlemarch


Andrew Murray

Pride makes us long for a solution to things - a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.

Julian Barnes,Flaubert's Parrot

The proud wish God would agree with them. They are not interested in changing their opinions to agree with God's.

Ezra Taft Benson

Pride is the mother of arrogance.     

Toba Beta

He who imagines he can do without the world deceives himself much; but he who fancies the world cannot do without him is still more mistaken.

Francois de la Rochefoucauld


C.S. Lewis quotes

It is more often from 'pride' than from ignorance that we are so obstinately opposed to current opinions; we find the first places taken, and we do not want to be the last.     

Franois de la Rochefoucauld

There is nothing that will kill a man so soon as having nobody to find fault with but himself.

George Eliot


Charles Caleb Coltoz