“Pride is the beginning of sin. And what is pride but the craving for undue exaltation? And this is undue exaltation – when the soul abandons Him to whom it ought to cleave as its end, and becomes a kind of end to itself.”
― Augustine of Hippo, City of God
“Most of us think of pride as self-centeredness, conceit, boastfulness, arrogance, or haughtiness. All of these are elements of the sin, but the heart, or core, is still missing. The central feature of pride is enmity – enmity towards God and enmity toward our fellow men.”
― Ezra Taft Benson
“The real difference in the believer who follows Christ and has mortified his will and died after the old man in Christ, is that he is more clearly aware than other men of the rebelliousness and perennial pride of the flesh, he is conscious of his sloth and self-indulgence and knows that his arrogance must be eradicated. Hence there is a need for daily self-discipline.”
― Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship
“Pride combined with wealth leads to idleness because you falsely feel that God just wants you to have fun; if unchecked, this sin will grow into entertainment-driven lust; if unchecked, this sin will grow into hardness of heart that declares other people’s problems no responsibility or care of your own; if unchecked, we become bold in our sin and feel entitled to live selfish lives fuelled by the twin values of our culture: acquiring and achieving.”
― Rosaria Champagne Butterfield, The Secret Thoughts of an Unlikely Convert
“A person who is obsessed with Jesus knows that the sin of pride is always a battle. Obsessed people know that you can never be ‘humble enough,’ and so they seek to make themselves less known and Christ more known [Matthew 5:16].”
― Francis Chan, Crazy Love: Overwhelmed by a Relentless God
“The deceitfulness of the heart of man appears in no one thing so much as this of spiritual pride and self-righteousness. The subtlety of Satan appears in its height, in his managing persons with respect to this sin. And perhaps one reason may be that here he has most experience; he knows the way of its coming in; he is acquainted with the secret springs of it: it was his own sin. Experience gives vast advantage in leading souls, either in good or evil.”
― Jonathan Edwards, The Religious Affections
“The corruption of the good by the belief in their own infallible goodness is the most bloody dangerous pitfall in the human spectrum. Once you have conquered all your sins, pride is the one which will conquer you. A man starts off deciding he is a good man because he makes good decisions. Next thing, he’s convinced that whatever decision he makes must be good because he’s a good man. Most of the wars in the world are caused by people who think they have god on their side. Always stick with people who know they are flawed and ridiculous.”
― Helen Fielding
“Self-centered indulgence, pride and a lack of shame over sin are now emblems of the American lifestyle.”
― Billy Graham
“There is nothing new under the sun but that of the Son. Man’s rebellion against God has always been because he would rather fall in pride than rise in humility.”
― Criss Jami, Healology
Through the gospel, we come to base our identity not on what we have achieved but on what has been achieved for us in Christ. And when the gospel, brought home to our hearts (see Eph 3:16–19), eats away at this sin-born neediness, it destroys the inner engines that drive sinful behavior. We don’t have to lie, because our reputation isn’t so important to us. We don’t have to respond in violent anger against opponents, because no one can touch our true treasure. The gospel destroys both the pride and the fearfulness that fuel moralistic behavior change. The gospel destroys pride, because it tells us we are so lost that Jesus had to die for us.”
― Timothy J. Keller, Center Church: Doing Balanced, Gospel-Centered Ministry in Your City
“Every man on earth is sick with the fever of sin, with the blindness of sin and is overcome with its fury. As sins consist mostly of malice and pride, it is necessary to treat everyone who suffers from the malady of sin with kindness and love. This is an important truth, which we often forget. Very often we act in the opposite manner: we add malice to malice by our anger, we oppose pride with pride. Thus, evil grows within us and does not decrease; it is not cured – rather it spreads”
― John of Kronstadt
“When the subject is sacred, proud and clever men may come to think that the outsiders who don’t know it are not merely inferior to them in skill but lower in God’s eyes; as the priests said, ‘All that rabble who are not experts in the Torah are accursed.’ and as this pride increases, the ‘subject’ or study which confers such privilege will grow more and more complicated, the list of things forbidden will increase, till to get through a single day without supposed sin becomes like an elaborate step-dance, and this horrible network breeds self-righteousness in some and haunting anxiety in others.”
― C.S. Lewis
“Pride is when sinful human beings aspire to the status and position of God and refuse to acknowledge their dependence upon Him.”
― C.J. Mahaney, Humility: True Greatness
“All the seven deadly sins are peccadilloes but without three of them, Pride, Lust, and Sloth, poetry might never have been born.”
― Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire
“The “war” is being fought along the line between sin and righteousness in every family. It is being fought along the line between truth and falsehood in every school… Between justice and injustice in every legislature… Between integrity and corruption in every office… Between love and hate in every ethnic group… Between pride and humility in every sport… Between the beautiful and the ugly in every art… Between right doctrine and wrong doctrine in every church… Between sloth and diligence between coffee breaks. It is not a waste to fight the battle for truth and faith and love on any of these fronts.”
― John Piper, Don’t Waste Your Life
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing. So is a lot.”
“A man should never be ashamed to own up that he has been in the wrong, which is but saying in other words that he is wiser today than he was yesterday.”
― Alexander Pope
“Oh thrice fools are we who like new-born princes weeping in the cradle know not that there is a kingdom before them then let our Lord’s sweet hand square us and hammer us and strike off the knots of pride self-love and world-worship and infidelity that He may make us stones and pillars in His Father’s house.”
― Samuel Rutherford
“Anyone who might feel reluctant to surrender his will to the will of another should remember Jesus’ words, “Whosoever committeth sin is the servant of sin.” We must of necessity be servant to someone, either to God or to sin. The sinner prides himself on his independence, completely overlooking the fact that he is the weak slave of the sins that rule his members. The man who surrenders to Christ exchanges a cruel slave driver for a kind and gentle Master whose yoke is easy and whose burden is light.”
― A.W. Tozer, The Pursuit of God
“Behind many of our besetting sins and personal failures, behind the many ills that infect our church fellowships and clog the channels of Christian service—the clash of personalities and temperaments, the strife and division—lies that insidious pride of the human heart.”
― Arthur Wallis, God’s Chosen Fast
“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.”
― N.T. Wright, Simply Christian: Why Christianity Makes Sense
Faith Unlocked 