Marie von Ebner-Eschenbach on pride

Fear not those who argue but those who dodge.

Whoever prefers the material comforts of life over intellectual wealth is like the owner of a palace who moves into the servants’ quarters and leaves the sumptuous rooms empty.

The world would be in better shape if people would take the same pains in the practice of the simplest moral laws as they exert in intellectualizing over the most subtle moral questions.

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