Conceit Quotes - Page 10

• Life knows us not and we do not know life—-we don’t know even our own thoughts. Half the words we use have no meaning whatever and of the other half each man understands each word after the fashion of his own folly and conceit. Faith is a myth and beliefs shift like mists on the shore; thoughts vanish; words, once pronounced, die; and the memory of yesterday is as shadowy as the hope of tomorrow

  Joseph Conrad

  Fashion, Memories, Men

  Joseph Conrad (2015). “The Selected Letters of Joseph Conrad”, p.89, Cambridge University Press

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• Teach me, dear creature, how to think and speak; Lay open to my earthy-gross conceit, Smother'd in errors, feeble, shallow, weak, The folded meaning of your words' deceit.

  William Shakespeare

  Lying, Thinking, Errors

  BookCaps, William Shakespeare (2011). “The Comedy of Errors In Plain and Simple English: BookCaps Study Guide”, p.72, BookCaps Study Guides

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• The vice I am talking of is Pride or Self-Conceit: and the virtue opposite to it, in Christian morals, is called Humility...According to Christian teachers, the essential vice, the utmost evil, is Pride. Unchastity, anger, greed, drunkenness, and all that, are mere flea bites in comparison: it was through Pride that the devil became the devil: Pride leads to every other vice: it is the complete anti-God state of mind.

  C. S. Lewis

  Christian, Teacher, Inspiration

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• Beware of being obsessed with consistency to your own convictions instead of being devoted to God. The important consistency in a saint is not to a principle but to the divine life. It is easier to be an excessive fanatic than it is to be consistently faithful, because God causes an amazing humbling of our religious conceit when we are faithful to Him.

  Oswald Chambers

  Religious, Consistency, Faithful

  Oswald Chambers (2013). “Utmost: Classic Readings and Prayers from Oswald Chambers”, p.80, Discovery House

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• I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.

  Lionel Shriver

  Safe, Damage, Common

  Lionel Shriver (2011). “We Need to Talk about Kevin”, p.7, Counterpoint Press

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• James often wondered at the chain of flukes it must have taken to bring him through with his own life and limbs intact. Once he might have believed it to be the work of Providence but it seemed to him now that to thank God for his life would be to suggest God had shrugged off all the others flicked them away like cigarette butts by the thousands and that seemed like abominable conceit. James Dorsey took no credit for being alive. His higher power these days was Chance.

  Laini Taylor

  Taken, Thank God, Would Be

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• I was not really angry: I felt for him all the time, and longed to be reconciled; but I determined he should make the first advances, or at least show some signs of an humble and contrite spirit, first; for, if I began, it would only minister to his self-conceit, increase his arrogance, and quite destroy the lesson I wanted to give him.

  Anne Bronte

  Humble, Self, Giving

  Anne Bronte (2006). “The Tenant of Wildfell Hall”, p.270, ReadHowYouWant.com

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• Those who set up a fictitious worship, merely worship and adore their own delirious fancies; indeed, they would never dare so to trifle with God, had they not previously fashioned him after their own childish conceits.

  John Calvin

  Fancy, Worship, Dare

  John Calvin (2012). “The Institutes Of The Christian Religion (Annotated Edition)”, p.53, Jazzybee Verlag

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• A quaint conceit, don't you think?

  Mercedes Lackey

  Thinking, Quaint

  Mercedes Lackey (2016). “The Last Herald-Mage Trilogy”, p.626, Penguin

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• 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 only job allowed him by the hereditary principle: that of waiting for his mother to expire.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Mother, Atheist, Kings

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “Arguably”, p.392, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• The cynics were watchdogs terrifying malefactors. They tried to expose falseness and conceit. That's why their name is still spoken with a snarl.

  Petr Skrabanek

  Names, Falseness, Stills

  Petr Skrabanek (2000). “False Premises, False Promises”

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• What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.

  George Eliot

  Opportunity, Air, Satisfaction

  George Eliot (1858). “Scenes of Clerical Life”, p.24

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• The path of least resistance and least trouble is a mental rut already made. It requires troublesome work to undertake the alternation of old beliefs. Self-conceit often regards it as a sign of weakness to admit that a belief to which we have once committed ourselves is wrong. We get so identified with an idea that it is literally a pet notion and we rise to its defense and stop our eyes and ears to anything different.

  John Dewey

  Inspirational, Eye, Ideas

  John Dewey (1986). “The Later Works, 1925-1953: 1933”, p.136, SIU Press

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• There has never been a poet or orator who thought another better than himself.

  Marcus Tullius Cicero

  Poet, Orators

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• Every person thinks his own intellect perfect, and his own child handsome.

  Saadi

  Children, Thinking, Perfect

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• I have frequently noticed in myself a tendency to a diffuse style; a disposition to push my metaphors too far, employing a multitude of words to heighten the patness of the image, and so making of it a conceit rather than a metaphor, a fault copiously illustrated in the poetry of Cowley, Waller, Donne, and others of that ilk.

  Sidney Lanier

  Style, Faults, Metaphor

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• A seed has to get buried in the soil for its real form as a plant to emerge. Only through modesty and humility can we grow. Pride and conceit will only destroy us. Live with the firm attitude, 'I am everyone's servant.' Then the whole universe will bow down to us.

  Mata Amritanandamayi

  Attitude, Real, Humility

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• From whence, then, could arise the solitary and strange conceit that the Almighty, who had millions of worlds equally dependant on His protection, should quit the care of all the rest, and come to die in our world, because, they say, one man and one woman had eaten an apple?

  Thomas Paine

  Men, Our World, Apples

  Thomas Paine (1852). “The Age of Reason: Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology”, p.60

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• Do anything in this world but monkey with somebody eles's religion. What reasoning of conceit makes anyone think theirs is right?

  Will Rogers

  Thinking, Religion, World

  Will Rogers, Bryan B. Sterling (1995). “Will Rogers Speaks: Over 1,000 Timeless Quotations for Public Speakers (writers, Politicians, Comedians, Browsers ...)”, M Evans & Company

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• No dogma taught by the present civilization seems to form so insuperable an obstacle in a way of a right understanding of the relations which culture sustains as to wilderness, as that which declares that the world was made especially for the uses of men. Every animal, plant, and crystal controverts it in the plainest terms. Yet it is taught from century to century as something ever new and precious, and in the resulting darkness the enormous conceit is allowed to go unchallenged.

  John Muir

  Nature, Men, Animal

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• In life, as on the stage, it's not who I am but what I do that's the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit.

  Stella Adler

  Who I Am, Arrogance, Secret

  Howard Kissel, Stella Adler (2000). “Stella Adler - The Art of Acting: preface by Marlon Brando compiled & edited by Howard Kissel”, p.131, Hal Leonard Corporation

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• Some drawings are better than others... Some are utterly spoiled... I keep them all. I find a use sometimes even for the worst drawing... But their chief use is to mortify one's conceit, to show how thoroughly incompetent it is possible to be, and to shame one into better ways.

  Walter J. Phillips

  Failure, Drawing, Use

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• This is a terrible confession to make, but after I left the Army I had a number of things to try. I had a great conceit to think that if all else failed I could always go to Hollywood. So when all else did fail I really went to Hollywood. And then I found out how wrong I was.

  David Niven

  Army, Thinking, Numbers

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• Gradually compositions make an appearance again. Political - satirical - conceits expressed in one figure or a few.

  Paul Klee

  Political, Appearance, Figures

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• It is impossible to understand the history of economic thought if one does not pay attention to the fact that economics as such is a challenge to the conceit of those in power.

  Ludwig von Mises

  Challenges, Doe, Attention

  Ludwig von Mises (2016). “Human Action”, p.85, Lulu Press, Inc

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