John Maynard Keynes Quotes

Man is not meant to be humble, he’s meant to be humbled.

Modesty, tis a virtue not often found among poets, for almost every one of them thinks himself the greatest in the world.

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.

I said I was 'The Greatest,' I never said I was the smartest!

I thought I was God's gift to mankind and the greatest Irishman since George Best.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

I'm not great enough to be humble.

It's hubris to think that the way we see things is everything there is.

I think there's a fine line between confidence and arrogance.

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 don't choose to be humble.

If you start to believe the hype about yourself, then you start to lose the bigger picture, and your focus is in the wrong place.

I think once you start to think that you're the man, and you know it all, and your style is unbeatable and stuff like that, that's when you get caught and clipped and get humbled really fast.

If a man thinks he is not conceited, he is very conceited indeed.

Pride never sleeps. The principle at least is always awake. An intemperate man is sometimes sober, but a proud man is never humble.

Whenever you wonder about yourself, look up at the stars swirling around in the heavens and just realize how tiny and puny they are. They're supposed to be gigantic explosions and they're just these insignificant little dots. If you step back from things far enough you realize how important and powerful you are.

Conceit spoils the finest genius?and the great charm of all power is modesty.

Unchecked pride evolves into swagger, a hypnotizing mask of insecurity that can and does compromise our ability to make progress and attain power. Pride stands in the way of forgiveness and a strategic approach to navigating a chessboard rigged to prevent pawns from becoming kings and queens.

If you have the choice between humble and cocky, go with cocky. There's always time to be humble later, once you've been proven horrendously, irrevocably wrong.

There is this paradox in pride - it makes some men ridiculous, but prevents others from becoming so.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

He thought others were small; that was his greatness.

A proud person is so busy looking down on others they cannot humble themselves to look up at God.

The greatest of all fools is the proud fool--who is at the mercy of every fool he meets.

There are men whose sense of humour is so ill developed that they still bear a grudge against Copernicus because he dethroned them from the central position in the universe. They feel it a personal affront that they can no longer consider themselves the pivot upon which turns the whole of created things.