Edward Young Quotes

Thinking you're immortal is weirdly similar to being immortal.

Such is the nature of men, that howsoever they may acknowledge many others to be more witty, or more eloquent, or more learned; yet they will hardly believe there be many so wise as themselves.

Vanity dies hard; in some obstinate cases it outlives the man.

The conceit of an anchorman is we never think we're going to die, I suppose.

I think it's one of the scars in our culture that we have too high an opinion of ourselves. We align ourselves with the angels instead of the higher primates.

We keep making the same mistakes as a species, and you can usually draw it back to the fact that we are all terrified of dying. We also all think that we are going to escape it until we get to 65!

The silent killer of all great men and women of achievement - particularly men, I don't know why, maybe it's the testosterone - I think it's narcissism. Even more than hubris. And for women, too. Narcissism is the killer.

We humans find it difficult to resist infection by hubris..

Unbridled arrogance is worse than pride; for if pride will not break a superior, arrogance will not brook and equal.

The very essence of the male animal, from the bantam rooster to the four-star general, is to strut.

I just find there's nothing funnier and more scary than a delusional man who thinks they're the center of the universe, and in fact they're not.

I had the erroneous conviction that all of history tended toward my birth and would diminish into chaos or inconsequence after I was gone. When you realize that's not so, the proper humility is to defer.

I find it alarming that people are so convinced they're the best at anything - presenting, hairdressing, getting dressed.

I think about the people that I've seen change because they believed in their own hype. I just never want that to happen to me.

Such is the weakness of our nature, that when men are a little exalted in their condition they immediately conceive they have additional senses, and their capacities enlarged not only above other men, but above human comprehension itself.

The demon of pride was born with us; and it will not die one hour before us.

Everyone knows they re going to die,' he said again, 'but nobody believes it. If we did, we would do things differently.

The mind will not believe in death, perhaps because, as far as the mind is concerned, death never happens.

There is no limit to the vanity of this world. Each spoke in the wheel thinks the whole strength of the wheel depends upon it.

Provided a man is not mad, he can be cured of every folly but vanity; there is no cure for this but experience, if indeed there is any cure for it at all.

I actually don't think that there is a connection between the survival instinct and a hunger for immortality.

After the bare requisites to living and reproducing, man wants most to leave some record of himself, a proof, perhaps, that he has really existed. He leaves his proof on wood, on stone or on the lives of other people. This deep desire exists in everyone, from the boy who writes dirty words in a public toilet to the Buddha who etches his image in the race mind. Life is so unreal. I think that we seriously doubt that we exist and go about trying to prove that we do.

Pride counterbalances all our miseries, for it either hides them, or, if it discloses them, boasts of that disclosure. Pride has such a thorough possession of us, even in the midst of our miseries and faults, that we are prepared to sacrifice life with joy, if it may but be talked of.

The pride of men will not often suffer reason to have scope until it can be no longer of service.

Man's ability to delude himself is infinite.