Contents -BIBLIOGRAPHIC RECORD

S. Austin Allibone, comp. Prose Quotations from Socrates to Macaulay. 1880.

Confidence

Too great confidence in success is the likeliest to prevent it; because it hinders us from making the best use of the advantages which we enjoy.

Use such as have prevailed before in things you have employed them; for that breeds confidence, and they will strive to maintain their prescription.

Audacity and confidence doth in business so great effects as a man may doubt that, besides the very daring and earnestness and persisting and importunity, there should be some secret binding and stooping of other men’s spirits to such persons.

Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions than ruined by too confident security.

Confidence is a plant of slow growth in an aged bosom.

Confidence, as opposed to modesty, and distinguished from decent assurance, proceeds from self-opinion, occasioned by ignorance and flattery.

Sith evils, great and unexpected, doth cause oftentimes even them to think upon divine power with fearfullest suspicions, which have been otherwise the most sacred adorers thereof; how should we look for any constant resolution of mind in such cases, saving only where unfeigned affection to God hath bred the most assured confidence to be assisted by his hand?

He that has confidence to turn his wishes into demands, will be but a little way from thinking he ought to obtain them.

A persuasion that we shall overcome any difficulties that we meet with in the sciences seldom fails to carry us through them.

Confidence in one’s self is the chief nurse of magnanimity; which confidence, notwithstanding, doth not leave the care of necessary furniture for it; and therefore, of all the Grecians, Homer doth ever make Achilles the best armed.

It concerns all who think it worth while to be in earnest with their immortal souls not to abuse themselves with a false confidence; a thing so easily taken up, and so hardly laid down.

Be not confident and affirmative in an uncertain matter, but report things modestly and temperately, according to the degree of that persuasion which is or ought to be begotten by the efficacy of the authority or the reason inducing thee.

He that puts his confidence in God only is neither overjoyed in any great good things of this life, nor sorrowful for a little thing.

But surely modesty never hurt any cause, and the confidence of man seems to me to be much like the wrath of man.

A true and humble sense of your own unworthiness will not suffer you to rise up to that confidence which some men unwarrantably pretend to, nay, unwarrantably require of others.

A confident dependence ill grounded creates such a negligence as will certainly ruin us in the end.