Josh Billings Quotes

I have a particular dislike of human pride. And if you think that you can engineer outcomes, that's a manifestation of pride. Among other things, it's impractical. It just doesn't work. The world doesn't work that way.

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.

Pride is not the worst of sins. In fact, it's one of the most interesting ones.

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.

When you have any kind of success in life, that's like the most dangerous moment that you're in because you're going to tend to think wow, I can just keep repeating what I've done. I'm a great person. People love me. All of the sudden they're giving me all of this attention. You get drunk on it and you lose your sense of balance and your sense of detachment. I know it's happened 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.

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

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

Thinking that your story is so interesting that other people will want to listen to it or read it or pay to hear it, that's - what kind of person thinks that? A monster of self-regard. It's not normal thinking.

There is no folly of which a man who is not a fool cannot get rid except vanity; of this nothing cures a man except experience of its bad consequences, if indeed anything can cure it.

I like France, where everybody thinks he's Napoleon--down here everybody thinks he's Christ.

Conceit is thinking you're great; egotism is knowing it.

Pride, on the other hand, is the mother of all sins, and the original sin of lucifer.... An instrument strung, but preferring to play itself because it thinks it knows the tune better than the Musician

Vanity can easily overtake wisdom. It usually overtakes common sense.

In general, pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.

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

Vanity is as old as the mammoth.

As for fame, it can go to your head and you can become full of yourself.

Vanity is my favourite sin.

Vanity is the quicksand of reason.

The minute I get a big head and start acting like the big man on campus, it's all downhill from there.

I think people who lack humility are really annoying.

Conceit is God's gift to little men.

I was hot and I knew it and it went to my head.

I believe that people start to get into trouble when they start to believe their own hype.