Quotes About Vainglory

In the fallen there is danger of pride and vainglory, since they prefer their own judgment to the judgment of everyone else, usurping what is not their own by setting themselves up as judges in their own cause when the rightful judge is their superior.

There really is such a thing as racial sin, whether it is racial vainglory or racial animosity. Sin is always sin, and God always hates it. Racism as defined by God is wickedness. Those who make a pet idol out of their skin tone, or who revile others because of their skin tone are the kind of people who go to Hell. They will not inherit the kingdom (1 Cor. 6:9–10). Racism, understood biblically, is no bagatelle.

If we should perish, the ruthlessness of the foe would be only the secondary cause of the disaster. The primary cause would be that the strength of a giant nation was directed by eyes too blind to see all the hazards of the struggle; and the blindness would be induced not by some accident of nature or history but by hatred and vainglory. —Reinhold Niebuhr, The Irony of American History, 1952

The self-anointed superior races, drunk on Darwin and nationalist hyperbole, besotted with eugenics and beguiled by myth, were winding up machines of genocide that soon would be unleashed upon a world already weary to the heart of such infinite foolery and contemptible vainglory.

In these our degenerate times, men bent on nothing but vainglory and personal gain – hollow, bombastic men for whom nothing is off-limits if it advances their petty cause – will claim to be great leaders

Hatred, racism, discrimination, distinction, and vainglory germinate in the soil of ego.

Of Pride. And though it be so that no man can accurately tell the number of the twigs and the evils that come from Pride, yet will I show you a part of them, as you shall understand. There is Disobedience, Boasting, Hypocrisy, Contempt, Arrogance, Impudence, Swelling of Heart, Insolence, Elation, Impatience, Haughtiness, Presumption, Irreverence, Obstinacy, Vainglory, and many another twig that I can not declare.

Understand from the first this certainty. Butterflies don't write books, neither do lilies or violets. Which doesn't mean they don't know, in their own way, what they are. That they don't know they are alive—that they don't feel, that action upon which all consciousness sits, lightly or heavily. Humility is the prize of the leaf-world. Vainglory is the bane of us, the humans.

Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness

And they went on. "Listen, the heart-shackles are not, as you think, death, illness, pain, unrequited hope, not loneliness, but lassitude, rue, vainglory, fear, anxiety, selfishness.

Vainglory and curiosity are the twin scourges of our souls. The former makes us stick our noses into everything: the latter forbids us to leave anything unresolved or undecided.

Showing off is the fool's idea of glory.

With no perceptible trace of the vainglorious about him, rather with the offhand unaffectedness of natural regality, he seemed to accept the spontaneous homage of his shipmates.

The desolate narrowness, the definitive thinness of experience is both the vainglory and the dead giveaway of a provincial man.

You could withdraw, remake your life with a small circle of friends who didn't wish to silence and punish their fellow countrymen with whom they disagreed, who knew the grievous threat to peace that arose from contempt for others, from an inflated self-esteem that became vainglory. But there was no town remote enough, no fortress walls high enough to protect you from mad ideas with mass appeal

Thus, sir, you see when faith is lacking, it becomes impossible to create certain states of happiness, for we lack the necessary humility. Vaingloriously, we try to substitute ourselves for this faith, creating thus for the rest of the world a reality which we believe after their fashion, while, actually, it doesn't exist.

Abba Poeman] also said, "If a monk can overcome two things, he can become free from the world." The brother asked him what these two things were and he said, "Bodily ease and vainglory."3