The truest characters of ignorance are vanity and pride and arrogance.

—Samuel Butler

ignorance character vanity price arrogance

About Samuel Butler

Portrait of Samuel Butler

Samuel Butler (4 December 1835 – 18 June 1902) was an English novelist and critic, best known for the satirical utopian novel Erewhon (1872) and the semi-autobiographical novel The Way of All Flesh (published posthumously in 1903 with substantial revisions and published in its original form in 1964 as Ernest...

More quotations from Samuel Butler

If we attend continually and promptly to the little that we can do, we shall ere long be surprised to find how little remains that we cannot do.

—Samuel Butler

I consider being ill as one of the great pleasures of life, provided one is not too ill.

—Samuel Butler

It is better to have loved and lost than never to have lost at all.

—Samuel Butler

Life is like playing a violin in public and learning the instrument as one goes on.

—Samuel Butler

God cannot alter the past, though historians can.

—Samuel Butler

More quotations tagged with “arrogance”

When I eventually met Mr. Right I had no idea that his first name was Always.

right compromise arrogance

When you're young, you always think you'll meet all sorts of wonderful people, that drifting apart and losing friends is natural. You don't worry, at first, about the friends you leave behind. But as you get older, it gets harder to build friendships. Too many defenses, too little opportunity. You get busy. And by the time you realize that you've lost the dearest best friend you've ever had, years have gone by and you're mature enough to be embarrassed by your attitude and, frankly, by your arrogance.

—Kate Jacobs in The Friday Night Knitting Club

friendship friends youth opportunity busyness attitude arrogance defense

The most important scientific revolutions all include, as their only common feature, the dethronement of human arrogance from one pedestal after another of previous convictions about our centrality in the cosmos.

—Stephen Jay Gould

learning knowledge certainty science arrogance centrality

Nothing can be so amusingly arrogant as a young man who has just discovered an old idea and thinks it is his own.

—Sydney J. Harris

knowledge age arrogance

History

19 Dec 2013 Added