Pride

September 23, 2013 by kevinstilley

Self-Righteousness – select quotes

The hardest people to reach with the love of God are not the bad people. They know they are bad. They have no defense. The hardest ones to win for God are the self-righteous people.
~ Charles L. Allen

When the mask of self-righteousness has been torn from us and we stand stripped of all our accustomed defenses, we are candidates for God’s generous grace.
~ Erwin Lutzer

Open sin kills its thousands of souls. Self-righteousness kills its tens of thousands.
~ J.C. Ryle, from The Cross of Christ

The greatest enemy to human souls is the self-righteous spirit which makes men look to themselves for salvation.
~ Charles Spurgeon

To be specific, the self-sins are these: self-righteousness, self-pity, self-confidence, self-sufficiency, self-admiration, self-love and a host of others like them. They dwell too deep within us and are too much a part of our natures to come to our attention till the light of God is focused upon them. The grosser manifestations of these sins, egotism, exhibitionism, self-promotion, are strangely tolerated in Christian leaders even in circles of impeccable orthodoxy. They are so much in evidence as actually, form any people, to become identified with the gospel. I trust it is not a cynical observation to say that they appear these days to be a requisite for popularity in some sections of the Church visible. Promoting self under the guise of promoting Christ is currently so common as to excite little notice.
~ A.W. Tozer, in The Pursuit of God, Chapter 3 – Removing the Veil

You save the humble but bring low those whose eyes are haughty.
~ Bible, Psalm 18:27

October 21, 2012 by kevinstilley

Pride – select quotes

Nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service, and nothing transforms the desires of the flesh like serving in hiddenness. The flesh whines agains service but screams against hidden service. It strains and pulls for honor and recognition. It will devise subtle, religiously acceptable means to call attention to the service rendered. If we stoutly refuse to give in to this lust of the flesh, we crucify it. Every time we crucify the flesh, we crucify our pride and arrogance.
~ Richard Foster, in Celebration of Discipline (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1978) page 130.

Pride is to character, like the attic to the house—the highest part, and generally the most empty.
~ Sydney Howard Gay

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man. We say that people are proud of being rich, or clever, or good-looking, but they are not. They are proud of being richer, or cleverer, or better-looking than others. If every one else became equally rich, or clever, or good-looking there would be nothing to be proud about. It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest.”
~ C.S. Lewis, in Mere Christianity, NY: Touchstone, Simon & Schuster, 1996, page 110

The truth is this—pride must die in you, or nothing of heaven can live in you.
~ Andrew Murray

Pride is at the bottom of all great mistakes.
~ John Ruskin

Man was created on the sixth day. If ever he is filled with pride, it can be said to him: A flea preceded thee in creation.
~ Talmud, Sanhedrin, 37

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Humility – select quotes

Life is a long lesson in humility.
~ James M. Barrie

The higher we are placed, the more humbly should we walk.
~ Cicero

Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil’s reach as humility.
~ Jonathan Edwards

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable that he believes them to be…. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.
~ Screwtape talking to Wormwood, in C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, NY: Bantam, 1982, page 41

Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot.
~ Thomas Moore

Humility is the bloom and beauty of holiness.
~ Andrew Murray

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Self-Righteousness – select quotes

Pride – select quotes

Humility – select quotes

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