Charlotte Brontë on pride

I care for myself. The more solitary, the more friendless, the more unsustained I am, the more I will respect myself.

I am no bird; and no net ensnares me: I am a free human being with an independent will, which I now exert to leave you.

If all the world hated you, and believed you wicked, while your own conscience approved you, and absolved you from guilt, you would not be without friends.

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