Ralph Waldo Emerson Quotes

It has to do with the fact that Ford, for all his greatness, is an Irish egomaniac, as anyone who knows him will say.

The people I respect the least are the ones that take themselves way too seriously.

Among the numerous stratagems by which pride endeavors to recommend folly to regard, there is scarcely one that meets with less success than affectation, or a perpetual disguise of the real character by fictitious appearances.

Most politicians are vain. Many of them are stupid.

It's hard to be humble, when you're as great as I am.

The worst disease which can afflict executives in their work is not, as popularly supposed, alcoholism; it's egotism.

I look upon another's insistence on the merits of his or her life - duties, intellect, accomplishment - and see that most of it is nonsense.

Frivolity is inborn, conceit acquired by education.

The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

When I would be myself, I was being big-headed. I was being egotistical. I was a megalomaniac, when it really was just having not to be a monkey for a few hours a day. And fulfilling the need to be a man.

I don't want the giant ego. I don't want to become Kevin Costner, singing on the soundtrack to The Postman.

Airs of importance are the credentials of impotence.

I haven't had the egomaniac star yet in any of my films. It's always been a pleasure.

I consider everybody who takes themselves seriously to be a little bit off. And Silicon Valley seems to be the most effusive about how important their contributions are to society.

A coxcomb is ugly all over with the effectation of a fine gentleman.

He thought others were small; that was his greatness.

This requires a level of delusion/egomania usually reserved for popes and drag queens

Laughter tends to mock the pompous and the pretentious; all man's boastful gadding about, all his pretty pomps, his hoary customs, his wornout creeds, changing the glitter of them into the dullest hue of lead.

Yes, vanity is a weakness indeed. But pride - where there is a real superiority of mind, pride will be always under good regulation.

Pride erects a little kingdom of its own, and acts as sovereign in it.

A coxcomb is four-fifths affectation and one-fifth vanity.

The mere leader of fashion has no genuine claim to supremacy; at least, no abiding assurance of it. He has embroidered his title upon his waistcoat, and carries his worth in his watch chain; and, if he is allowed any real precedence for this it is almost a moral swindle,--a way of obtaining goods under false pretences.

Being famous gives you a lot of illusions of false self, of self-importance, a grandiosity, it becomes difficult to stay humble and real. You see so many people who don't succeed.

Paltry affectation, strained allusions, and disgusting finery are easily attained by those who choose to wear them; they are but too frequently the badges of ignorance or of stupidity, whenever it would endeavor to please.

When a youth was giving himself airs in the Theatre and saying, 'I am wise, for I have conversed with many wise men,' Epictetus replied, 'I too have conversed with many rich men, yet I am not rich!’.