Simone Weil on pride

Only he who has measured the dominion of force, and knows how not to respect it, is capable of love and justice.

One of the most exquisite pleasures of human love — to serve the loved one without his knowing it — is only possible, as regards the love of God, through atheism.

Art is the symbol of the two noblest human efforts: to construct and to refrain from destruction.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you’re looking down, you can’t see something that’s above you.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963Mere Christianity (1952), Book III, Chapter 8, “The Great Sin”

But we have forgotten God. We have forgotten the gracious Hand which preserved us in peace, and multiplied and enriched and strengthened us; and we have vainly imagined, in the deceitfulness of our hearts, that all these blessings were produced by some superior wisdom and virtue of our own.

Abraham Lincoln1809–1865Upon proclaiming a National Fast Day (30 March 1863)

• God

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man.

C. S. Lewis1898–1963