Best 90 quotes in «hubris quotes» category

Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

For many generations…they obeyed the laws and loved the divine to which they were akin…they reckoned that qualities of character were far more important than their present prosperity. So they bore the burden of their wealth and possessions lightly, and did not let their high standard of living intoxicate them or make them lose their self-control… But when the divine element in them became weakened…and their human traits became predominant, they ceased to be able to carry their prosperity with moderation.

His life had in fact been colossal and, like everything colossal, pointless.

f you are too good to look after God’s trash, you are not good enough to look after God’s treasure.

Guard your hubris. Remember Pax. Pride kills.

He believed that Galileo was wrong when he imagined an Earth that revolved around the sun. In his heart of hearts, Peter knew that the sun that was slowly rising over his city revolved around him.

In our age, mankind collectively has given itself over to a degree of hubris surpassing everything known in former ages.

Hubris is when God screws you over for being a smartass.

If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it." narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19

In contradistinction to the underestimation in the field of rocket science and the aerospace industry, Parsons' accomplishments in the arcane sciences have been highly overrated and grossly exaggerated. As a magician he was essentially a failure. As a Thelemite he learned the hard way what was required. He loved Crowley's 'Law' but couldn't adhere to it—though he tried harder than most. He violated the rules, undertook unauthorized and unorthodox magical operations, and claimed the grade of Magister Templi without first completing all the grades below it. He couldn't handle working under authority—his ego was too big. His record of failure is valuable in that regard. He was a great promulgator of thelemic ideals in his essays, but as an idealist his elitism ruined his work. Indeed, some would say he was guilt of hubris, which the gods always punish.

Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd, The greater part by hostile time subdu'd; Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past, And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

In the vastness of the United States of America, the island nation Britain found the perfect vessel into which to pour its continental-sized hubris and ambition.

It is the certainty that they possess the truth that makes men cruel. -Anatole France, novelist, essayist, Nobel laureate (1844-1924)

It takes a whole government to really screw up a war. A dollop of American hubris goes a long way too.

Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.

Men who thought of themselves as gods fell the farthest, and the hardest.

Mis-define the law of brotherly love by giving men a claim on their neighbors and you have destroyed freedom, justified despotism, and assumed that there can be a master mind, in an ordinary human being, as the mind of God.

Naturally, the plague of humanity named confidence (or pride to some), which symptoms often render each person to fiercely believe himself to be above average, let them to believe that it was others who were affected by this case but not them. Everyone thought they had the quintessential ability to detach themselves from the cases they were working, even if the victim looked and behaved exactly like their son, daughter, niece or nephew.

No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.

No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.

It doesn’t take long for your fortunes to turn. One second you’re fluttery as a bird, the next you’re on the ground with your wings clipped.

Pride is born as a mountaintop on a valley, but dies as an abyss in which it is too deep and too dark to see the better.

Note from Alien cookbook: “The more intelligent the human is, the better it tastes.

Power swells the head and shatters the crown.

That's very noble of you, cautionary tales of hubris notwithstanding.' 'Hah! Please. Find me a more universally REWARDED quality than hubris. Go on, I'll wait. The word is just ancient Greek for "uppity," as far as I'm concerned. Hubris isn't something that destroys you, it's something you are PUNISHED for. By the GODS. Well, I've never met a god, just powerful human beings with a lot to gain by keeping people scared. So fuck hubris! Punch the sun, baby!

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion. This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.

Most humans turn away from God simply for the privilege of deluding themselves into thinking they are the masters of their own destiny.

The Duke has decreed that the Castle is not cold." The gentleman's lips are almost blue from this lack of cold. "And the Duke is right and correct in this as in all things." ...some very beautiful tapestries line the walls, but many of them are also full of holes. Perhaps the Duke has decreed that there are no moths, either.

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

The Duke would not pay for the works. He says that the Castle can never be taken. That is called hubris, Giacomo, the belief that you are never wrong. Believing you are never wrong is an error that afflicts great men. I have learned that to be right you must first be wrong many times. Without making errors--and learning from them--a man cannot find the truth.

There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's.

The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us.

The true artist will let his wife starve, his children go barefoot, his mother drudge for his living at seventy, sooner than work at anything but his art. To women he is half vivisector, half vampire. He gets into intimate relations with them to study them, to strip the mask of convention from them, to surprise their inmost secrets, knowing that they have the power to rouse his deepest creative energies, to rescue him from his cold reason, to make him see visions and dream dreams, to inspire him, as he calls it. He persuades women that they may do this for their own purpose whilst he really means them to do it for his. He steals the mother’s milk and blackens it to make printer’s ink to scoff at her and glorify ideal women with. He pretends to spare her the pangs of child-bearing so that he may have for himself the tenderness and fostering that belong of right to her children. Since marriage began, the great artist has been known as a bad husband. But he is worse: he is a child-robber, a blood-sucker, a hypocrite, and a cheat. Perish the race and wither a thousand women if only the sacrifice of them enable him to act Hamlet better, to paint a finer picture, to write a deeper poem, a greater play, a profounder philosophy! For mark you, Tavy, the artist’s work is to shew us ourselves as we really are. Our minds are nothing but this knowledge of ourselves; and he who adds a jot to such knowledge creates new mind as surely as any woman creates new men. In the rage of that creation he is as ruthless as the woman, as dangerous to her as she to him, and as horribly fascinating. Of all human struggles there is none so treacherous and remorseless as the struggle between the artist man and the mother woman. Which shall use up the other? that is the issue between them. And it is all the deadlier because, in your romanticist cant, they love one another.

The violent but narrow passions that pass under the name of patriotism are not the noblest forms of human and social emotions. The world, or the people who, unfortunately, have most to say in governing the world, believe no such thing, and will not believe it when the representatives of States meet again to decide how to fill up the graves which they helped dig in Europe.

The word I use is hubris. Our word for arrogance that scrapes the stars, for violence and towering rage as ugly as the gods.

Unbridled talent can handicap you with hubris.

We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.

What do you think you are doing by infesting the whole world? Because I do it with one puny boat, I am called a pirate; because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.

What magic was this, brewed from equal parts of age-old memories and total oblivion. One could have believed that the last war these people had fought had left only happy memories, had carried in its wake nothing but joy and prosperity. Women and girls were smiling as if their sons and lovers were invulnerable.

Continue to learn with humility, not hubris. Hubris is boring.

The author describes megalomania as seen in Chairman Mao by saying that what he was familiar with, he was really familiar with. This zeal moved the megalomaniac with a complete lack of appreciation for what he DID NOT know.

The exegetical foundations would appear to be weak, and one shouldn’t build huge theological edifices, no matter how splendid or consistent, on weak foundations.

The irony of informing nearly naked people in a wilderness setting about the story of naked Adam and Eve eating the fruit of knowledge and inventing the fashion industry due to a sudden need for clothing to hide their shame is not lost on Williams.

The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

The real question is why you still believe in that invisible god when a true one stands before you?

There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time.

There is no small irony here: An administration which flaunted its intellectual superiority and its superior academic credentials made the most critical of decisions with virtually no input from anyone who had any expertise on the recent history of that part of the world, and it in no way factored in the entire experience of the French Indochina War. Part of the reason for this were the upheavals of the McCarthy period, but in part it was also the arrogance of men of the Atlantic; it was as if these men did not need to know about such a distant and somewhat less worthy part of the world. Lesser parts of the world attracted lesser men; years later I came upon a story which illustrated this theory perfectly. Jack Langguth, a writer and college classmate of mine, mentioned to a member of that Administration that he was thinking of going on to study Latin American history. The man had turned to him, his contempt barely concealed, and said, “Second-rate parts of the world for second-rate minds.

There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.

To wish to withstand the Holy Spirit would be the one unforgivable sin.

Upon what meat doth this our Caesar feed that he is grown so great?