C.N. Douglas, comp. Forty Thousand Quotations: Prose and Poetical. 1917.
Self-conceit
Self-contemplation is apt to end in self-conceit.
Even dress is apt to inflame a man’s opinion of himself.
In one thing men of all ages are alike; they have believed obstinately in themselves.
We can bear to be deprived of everything but our self-conceit.
The less a man thinks or knows about his virtues the better we like him.
There is a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness.
Many men spend their lives in gazing at their own shadows, and so dwindle away into shadows thereof.
In the same degree that we overrate ourselves, we shall underrate others; for injustice allowed at home is not likely to be corrected abroad.
Prize not thyself by what thou hast, but by what thou art; he that values a jewel by her golden frame, or a book by her silver clasps, or a man by his vast estate, errs; if thou art not worth more than the world can make thee, thy Redeemer had a bad pennyworth, or thou an uncurious Redeemer.
I have sometimes thought that people are, in a sort, happy, that nothing can put out of countenance with themselves, though they neither have nor merit other people’s.
He that fancies himself very enlightened because he sees the deficiencies of others may be very ignorant, because he has not studied his own.
Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage.
To be infatuated with the power of one’s own intellect is an accident which seldom happens but to those who are remarkable for the want of intellectual power. Whenever Nature leaves a hole in a person’s mind, she generally plasters it over with a thick coat of self-conceit.
And yet we are very apt to be full of ourselves, instead of Him that made what we so much value, and but for whom we can have no reason to value ourselves. For we have nothing that we can call our own, no, not ourselves; for we are all but tenants, and at will too, of the great Lord of ourselves, and the rest of this great farm, the world that we live upon.
Those who, either from their own engagements and hurry of business, or from indolence, or from conceit and vanity, have neglected looking out of themselves, as far as my experience and observation reach, have from that time not only ceased to advance, and improve in their performances, but have gone backward. They may be compared to men who have lived upon their principal, till they are reduced to beggary, and left without resources.