Florence Nightingale on pride

You ask me why I do not write something… I think one’s feelings waste themselves in words; they ought all to be distilled into actions and into actions which bring results.

I never lose an opportunity of urging a practical beginning, however small, for it is wonderful how often in such matters the mustard-seed germinates and roots itself.

What the horrors of war are, no one can imagine.

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