Matthew Scully Quotes

Great eagerness in the pursuit of wealth, pleasure, or honor, cannot exist without sin.

The pride of dying rich raises the loudest laugh in hell.

Honor is but an empty bubble.

I look upon pride as a sin.

But let us not too hastily triumph in the shame of Sparta, lest we aggravate our own condemnation.

Pride is essentially competitive in nature. We pit our will against God's.

The beast for me is greed. Whether you read Dante, Swift, or any of these guys, it always boils down to the same thing: the corruption of the soul.

A man's vanity tells him what is honor, a man's conscience what is justice.

Social networks do best when they tap into one of the seven deadly sins. Facebook is ego. Zynga is sloth. LinkedIn is greed.

Pride, envy, avarice—these sparks Have set on fire the hearts of all men.

These are the meats to abstain from- others' wealth, others' wives, slander, envy, covetousness and pride.

Moliere exaggerates common vices of mankind: lust, greed, misanthropy, hypocrisy. We all have a touch of these.

Nothing makes one so vain as being told that one is a sinner.

There's right and there's wrong. You got to do one or the other. You do the one and you're living. You do the other and you may be walking around, but you're dead as a beaver hat.

The fact that man knows right from wrong proves his intellectual superiority to the other creatures; but the fact that he can do wrong proves his moral inferiority to any creatures that cannot.

Each decision - to kill, to sign a petition, to write a letter, to make a speech, to attack, to lie, to surrender - was made at some point in somebody's day.

I'd be a dog, a monkey, or a bear, or anything but that vain animal who is so proud of being rational.

As regards this vice, we read that the peacock is more guilty of it than any other animal. For it is always contemplating the beauty of its tail, which it spreads in the form of a wheel, and by its cries attracts to itself the gaze of the creatures that surround it. And this is the last vice to be conquered.

If we are defined by reason and morality, then reason and morality must define our choices, even when animals are concerned. When people say, for example, that they like their veal or hot dogs too much to ever give them up, and yeah it's sad about the farms but that's just the way it is, reason hears in that the voice of gluttony. We can say that what makes a human being human is precisely the ability to understand that the suffering of an animal is more important than the taste of a treat.

Hypocrisy is bad, but it's not the worst vice in the world. If I declared “murder is wrong” and then killed somebody, I would hope that the top count against me would be homicide, not hypocrisy. Liberal elites ' particularly in Hollywood ' believe that hypocrisy is the gravest sin in the world, which is why they advocate their own lifestyles for the entire world: Sleep with whomever you want, listen to your own instincts, be true to yourself, blah, blah, blah. Our fear of hypocrisy is forcing us to live in a world where gluttons are fine, so long as they champion gluttony.

The issues of the choice between right and wrong has to be an ongoing concern for everybody, at every age. There is no magical point in a human life when anyone is or becomes immune to the second-by-second choice to do right instead of wrong.

Honor is decency without vanity.

When you're thinking, please remember this: excessive pride is a familiar sin, but a man may just as easily frustrate the will of God through excessive humility.

Vanity is so anchored in the heart of man that a soldier, a soldier's servant, a cook, a porter brags and wishes to have his admirers. Even philosophers wish for them. Those who write against vanity want to have the glory of having written well; and those who read it desire the glory of having read it. I who write this have perhaps this desire, and perhaps those who will read it.

A man should never boast of his courage, nor a woman of her virtue, lest their doing so should be the cause of calling their possession of them into question.