/tag/pride

6 quotes tagged 'pride'

Myths to live by
Author: Joseph Campbell
Publisher: Joseph Campbell Foundation (2011)
148

One of the most amazing images of love that I know is Persian -- a mystical Persian representation of Satan as the most loyal lover of God. You will have heard the old legend of how, when God created the angels, he commanded them to pay worship to no one but himself; but then, creating man, he commanded them to bow in reverence to this most noble of his works, and Lucifer refused -- because, we are told, of his pride. However, according to this Moslem reading of his case, it was rather because he loved and adored God so deeply and intensely that he could not bring himself to bow before anything else. And it was for that that he was flung into Hell, condemned to exist there forever, apart from his love. \r\n\r\nNow it has been said that of all the pains of Hell, the worst is neither fire nor stench but the deprivation forever of the beatific sight of God. How infinitely painful, then, must the exile of this great lover be, who could not bring himself, even on God's own word, to bow before any other being! \r\n\r\nThe Persian poets have asked, 'By what power is Satan sustained?' And the answer that they have found is this: 'By his memory of the sound of God's voice when he said, 'Be gone!' ' What an image of that exquisite spiritual agony which is at once the rapture and the anguish of love!


The Quiet American
Author: Graham Greene
Publisher: Penguin Classics (2004)
0

If only it were possible to love without injury - fidelity isn't enough... The hurt is in the act of possession: we are too small in mind and body to possess another person without pride or to be possessed without humiliation.


Mere Christianity
Author: C.S. Lewis
Publisher: HarperOne (2001)
0

It is more like a hall out of which doors open into several rooms. If I can bring anyone into that hall I shall have done what I attempted. But it is in the rooms, not in the hall, that there are fires and chairs and meals. The hall is a place to wait in, a place from which to try the various doors, not a place to live in. For that purpose the worst of the rooms (whichever that may be) is, I think, preferable. It is true that some people may find they have to wait in the hall for a considerable time, while others feel certain almost at once which door they must knock at. I do not know why there is this difference, but I am sure God keeps no one waiting unless He sees that it is good for him to wait. When you do get into your room you will find that the long wait has done you some kind of good which you would not have had otherwise. But you must regard it as waiting, not as camping. You must keep on praying for light: and, of course, even in the hall, you must begin trying to obey the rules which are common to the whole house. And above all you must be asking which door is the true one; not which pleases you best by its paint and panelling. In plain language, the question should never be: 'Do I like that kind of service?' but 'Are these doctrines true: Is holiness here? Does my conscience move me towards this? Is my reluctance to knock at this door due to my pride, or my mere taste, or my personal dislike of this particular door-keeper?'\n\n 'When you have reached your own room, be kind to those who have chosen different doors and to those who are still in the hall. If they are wrong they need your prayers all the more; and if they are your enemies, then you are under orders to pray for them. That is one of the rules common to the whole house.


The Origins and History of Consciousness
Author: Erich Neumann
Publisher: Princeton University Press (1954)
209

The magical effect of the rite is factual enough, and in no sense illusory.  Moreover it actually works out, just as primitive man supposes, in his hunting successes; only the effect does not proceed via the object but via the subject.  The magical rite, like all magic and indeed every higher intention, including those of religion, acts upon the subject who practices the magic or the religion, by altering and enhancing his own ability to act.  In this sense the outcome of the action, whether it be hunting, war, or whatever else, is in the highest degree objectively dependent upon the effect of the magic ritual.  It was left for modern man to make the psychological discovery that the operative factor in magic is the 'reality of the soul' and not the reality of the world.  Originally the reality of the soul was projected outwards upon an external reality.  Even today prayers for victory are commonly regarded not as an inner alteration of the psyche but as an effort to influence God.  In exactly the same way, hunting magic was experienced as an effort to influence the quarry, and not as an influencing of the hunter himself.  In both cases our enlightened rationalism misunderstands the magic and prayer as illusory, in its scientific pride at having established that the object cannot be influenced.  In both cases it is wrong.  An effect that proceeds from an alteration in the subject is objective and real.


This Is It
Author: Alan Watts
Publisher: Vintage (1973)
0

There are two obvious escapes from this dilemma (the struggle of choosing good vs evil).  One is to stop being too keenly intelligent and too acutely conscious of the facts of one's inner life, and to fall back upon an inflexibly formal, traditional, and authoritarian pattern of thought and action - as if to say, 'Just do the  right thing, and don't be sophisticatedly psychological about your motives.  Just obey, and don't ask questions.'  This is called sacrificing the pride of the intellect.  But here we find ourselves in another dilemma, for the religion of simple obedience soon totters toward empty formalism and moral legalism with no heart in it, the very Pharisaism against which Christ railed.  The other escape is into a romanticism of the instincts, a glorification of mere impulse ignoring the equally natural gift of will and reason.  This is actually a modern form of the old practice of selling one's soul to the Devil - always a possible release from anxiety and conflict because damnation could at least be certain.


The Brothers Karamazov
Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)
0

In my view it is not necessary to destroy anything, all that need be destroyed in mankind is the idea of God, that is what one must proceed from! It is with that, with that one must begin - O, blind ones, who understand nothing! Once mankind, each and individually, has repudiated God (and I believe that that period, in a fashion parallel to the geological periods, will arrive), then of its own accord, and without the need of anthropophagy, the whole of the former world-outlook and, above all, the whole of the former morality, will collapse, and all will begin anew. People will unite together in order to take from life all that it is able to give, but only for the sake of happiness and joy in this world. Man will exalt himself with a spirit of divine, titanic pride, and the man-god will appear. Vanquishing nature hour by hour, already without limits, by his will and science, man will thereby experience, hour by hour, a pleasure so elevated that it will replace all his former hopes of celestial pleasure. Every man will discover that he is wholly mortal, without the possibility of resurrection, and will accept death proudly and calmly, like a god. Out of pride he will grasp that there is no point in him complaining that life is a moment, and he will come to love his brother without any need of recompense. The love will only be sufficient for the moment of life, but the very consciousness of life's momentariness will intensify its fire just as much as it formerly ran to fat in hopes of an infinite love beyond the grave.