QUOTATION: Knowledge of Self

Knowledge of the self is also a safeguard against pride, especially when you are tempted in life. The greatest mistake is to think you are too strong to fall into temptation.

--Mother Teresa of Calcutta, No Greater Love

QUOTATION: Humility

If pride is the great human obstacle to faith, it follows that, from the human side, the essential condition of receiving faith is humility. Humility is not an underestimation of what we are, but the plain, unadulterated truth. A man who is 6 feet tall is not humble if he says: “No really, I am only 5 feet tall.”

--Fulton J. Sheen, Preface to Religion

QUOTATION: Pride

Pride makes it impossible to know God. If I know everything, then not even God can teach me anything. If I am filled with myself, then there is no place for God.

--Fulton J. Sheen, Preface to Religion

QUOTATION: The Unforgivable Sin

If God is totally good, he is not Scrooge. He does not forgive some things; he forgives all things. The only possible sin that cannot be forgiven is not accepting forgiveness, which is why in traditional Christian theology, pride is the worst of sins: “I am too good to be forgiven; there is nothing to forgive.”

--Peter Kreeft, quoted in Socrates in the City, ed. Eric Metaxas, 2003

QUOTATION: Pride

Pride is the exaltation of self as an absolute standard of truth, goodness and morality. It judges everything by itself, and for that reason everyone else is a rival, particularly God.

--Fulton J. Sheen, Preface to Religion

QUOTATION: Pride

Pride is spiritual cancer: it eats up the very possibility of love, contentment, or even common sense.

--C.S. Lewis

QUOTATION: Humility and Pride

Humility is nothing but truth, and pride is nothing but lying.

--St. Vincent de Paul

QUOTATION: Pride

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition has gone, pride has gone.

--C.S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: Pride

The devil laughs. He is perfectly content to see you becoming chaste and brave and self-controlled provided, all the time, he is setting up in you the Dictatorship of Pride - just as he would be quite content to see your chilblains cured if he was allowed, in return, to give you cancer.

--C. S. Lewis, Mere Christianity

QUOTATION: Falls from Grace

My beloved, may every fall, even if it is serious and habitual sin, always become for us a small step toward a higher degree of perfection.

In fact, the only reason why the Immaculate permits us to fall is to cure us from our self-conceit, from our pride, to make us humble and thus make us docile to the divine graces.

The devil, instead, tries to inject in us discouragement and internal depression in those circumstances, which is, in fact, nothing else than our pride surfacing again.

--St. Maximillian Kolbe

QUOTATION: An Antidote to Pride

When you feel sentiments of vanity or pride rising in your heart, hasten to apply a remedy immediately. One that is most efficacious consists in recalling to mind all your sins, particularly the most shameful. Like a wise physician, you will thus counteract the effect of one poison by another.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: Self-Knowledge is the Key to Humility

Since humility comes from a knowledge of ourselves, pride necessarily springs from ignorance of ourselves. Whoever, therefore, seriously desires to acquire humility must earnestly labor to know himself. How, in fact, can he be otherwise than humbled who, looking into his heart with the light of truth, finds himself filled with sins; defiled with the stains of sinful pleasures; the sport of a thousand errors, fears, and caprices; the victim of innumerable anxieties and petty cares; oppressed by the weight of a mortal body; so forward in evil and so backward in good? Study yourself, then, with serious attention, and you will find in yourself nothing of which to be proud.

--Louis de Granada, The Sinner's Guide

QUOTATION: False Humility

Pride remains in humiliation, glorying like the cynic in its abject condition, but grace raises the humble soul making it rebound in proportion to its voluntary abasement.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: False Pride in Suffering

Do not be like those proud and self-conceited church- goers, imagining that your crosses are heavy, that they are proofs of your fidelity and marks of God's exceptional love for you. This temptation, arising from spiritual pride, is most deceptive, subtle and full of poison. You must believe (1) that your pride and sensitiveness make you magnify splinters into planks, scratches into wounds, molehills into mountains, a passing word meaning nothing into an outrageous insult or a cruel slight; (2) that the crosses God sends you are loving punishments for your sins rather than marks of God's special favour; (3) that whatever cross or humiliation he sends you is exceedingly light in comparison with the number and the greatness of your offences, for you should consider your sins in the light of God's holiness, who can tolerate nothing that is defiled, and against whom you have set yourself; in the light of a God suffering death while overwhelmed with sorrow at the sight of your sins; in the light of an everlasting hell which you have deserved time and again; (4) that the patience with which you bear your sufferings is tinged more than you think with natural and human motives. Witness those little ways of looking after yourself, that unobtrusive seeking for sympathy, those confidences you make in such a natural way to your friends, and perhaps to your spiritual director, those specious excuses you are so ready with, those complaints, or rather criticisms of those who have done you an injury, expressed in such pleasant words and charitable manner, that keen satisfaction you feel on considering your troubles, that self-complacency of Lucifer which makes you imagine you are somebody, and so on. I should never finish if I were to describe here all the twists and turns of human nature, even in suffering.

--St. Louis de Montfort, Letter to the Friends of the Cross

QUOTATION: Pride

The practical case against pride, as a mere source of social discomfort and discord, is if possible even more self-evident than the more mystical case against it, as a setting up of the self against the soul of the world. And yet though we see this thing on every side in modern life, we really hear very little about it in modern literature and ethical theory. Indeed, a great deal of modern literature and ethics might be meant specially for the encouragement of spiritual pride. Scores of scribes and sages are busy writing about the importance of self-culture and self-realisation; about how every child is to be taught to develop his personality (whatever that may be); about how every man must devote himself to success, and every successful man must devote himself to developing a magnetic and compelling personality; about how every man may become a superman (by taking Our Correspondence Course) or, in the more sophisticated and artistic type of fiction, how one specially superior superman can learn to look down on the mere mob of ordinary supermen, who form the population of that peculiar world. Modern theory, as a whole, is rather encouraging egoism. But we need not be alarmed about that. Modern practice, being exactly like ancient practice, is still heartily discouraging it. The man with the strong magnetic personality is still the man whom those who know him best desire most warmly to kick out of the club. The man in a really acute stage of self-realisation is a no more pleasing object in the club than in the pub. Even the most enlightened and scientific sort of club can see through the superman; and see that he has become a bore. It is in practice that the philosophy of pride breaks down; by the test of the moral instincts of man wherever two or three are gathered together; and it is the mere experience of modern humanity that answers the modern heresy.

--G.K. Chesterton, The Common Man

QUOTATION: Pride Kills Mercy

Our sins will never be so great as the mercy of God. There is one thing, however, one thing that it cannot conquer, and against which it can do nothing, and that is, the pride of supernatural gifts, which with full knowledge rejects God's goodness, and kills itself.

--St. Peter Julian Eymard

QUOTATION: Pride and Humility

Pride seeks after honours and is grieved when it is despised; humility is averse to being treated well and rejoices in contempt, which it knows that it deserves, and its own uprightness renders it desirous that justice should be done.

Pride never has what it wants, for whatever it possesses, or has given to it, it considers that it deserves still more; while humility always thinks it has more than enough, for it believes that it is unworthy to walk the earth, and that hell itself is not sufficient punishment for its sins.

Pride can live in peace with no one, not even with itself, while humility agrees with all men, for it abases itself before everyone and bears patiently with them, believing with all its heart that they are better than itself.

Pride finds it insupportable to submit to others, whether to God, or a mortal creature, but humility gives way and bows down, so that it is able to pass through the "narrow gate" of obeying the will of God and man.

--St. John of Avila, Letters, XXIII

(Formatted for easier reading)

QUOTATION: A Self-Satisfied Heart

Nothing so offends its Creator as a self-satisfied heart, because it contains no empty vessel into which He can pour the riches of His mercy. It will remain in its natural poverty, for it can offer no place into which the waters of grace may flow, to make it live happily with God, and bring forth much fruit, like a well-watered garden.

--St. John of Avila, Letters, XXIII

QUOTATION: Pride

Pride is the exaltation of self as an absolute standard of truth, goodness and morality. It judges everything by itself, and for that reason everyone else is a rival, particularly God. Pride makes it impossible to know God. If I know everything, then not even God can teach me anything. If I am filled with myself, then there is no place for God. Like the inns of Bethlehem, we say to the Divine Visitor: "There is no room."

--Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen

QUOTATION: Impatience with Ourselves

To be exasperated at ourselves after a fault is not humility, but a subtle pride, as if we were anything else than the weak and miserable things that we are.

--St. Alphonsus Liguori, The Holy Eucharist