“Pride only helps us to be generous; it never makes us so, any more than vanity makes us witty.”
Source: Middlemarch
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George Eliot300
English novelist, journalist and translator 1819–1880Related quotes
James Baldwin book The Fire Next Time
Source: "Letter from a Region of My Mind" in The New Yorker (17 November 1962); republished as "Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind" in The Fire Next Time (1963)
Context: If the concept of God has any validity or any use, it can only be to make us larger, freer, and more loving. If God cannot do this, then it is time we got rid of Him.
“What makes the vanity of others insufferable to us is that it wounds our own.”
François de La Rochefoucauld book Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims
Ce qui nous rend la vanité des autres insupportable, c'est qu'elle blesse la nôtre.
Maxim 389.
Reflections; or Sentences and Moral Maxims (1665–1678)
Norman Mailer book Advertisements for Myself
"Advertisement for Myself on the Way Out"
Advertisements for Myself (1959)
James Blish book The Quincunx of Time
Source: The Quincunx of Time (1973), Chapter 10, “Weinbaum on Sinai” (pp. 118-119)
George Bernard Shaw (1856–1950) Irish playwright
Preface
1910s, The Doctor's Dilemma (1911)
Variant: A life spent making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.
Context: Attention and activity lead to mistakes as well as to successes; but a life spent in making mistakes is not only more honorable but more useful than a life spent doing nothing.