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30fc904 Do not let arrogance go to your head and despair to your heart; do not let compliments go to your head and criticisms to your heart; do not let success go to your head and failure to your heart. arrogance compliment criticism despair failure heart inspiration inspirational inspirational-attitude inspirational-life inspirational-quotes inspire inspiring life life-and-living life-lessons life-quotes living motivation motivational optimism optimistic positive positive-affirmation positive-life positive-thinking success Roy T. Bennett
2bd4107 I suppose that one reason I have always detested religion is its sly tendency to insinuate the idea that the universe is designed with 'you' in mind or, even worse, that there is a divine plan into which one fits whether one knows it or not. This kind of modesty is too arrogant for me. arrogance atheism modesty religion solipsism Christopher Hitchens
7295537 Those who travel to mountain-tops are half in love with themselves, and half in love with oblivion. adventure arrogance humility inspirational mountaineering mountains oblivion Robert Macfarlane
a13a626 I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim--so modestly and so humbly--to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world. atheism belief fantasy god humility inspirational modesty power religion respect arrogance Christopher Hitchens
a93538d Arrogance on the part of the meritorious is even more offensive to us than the arrogance of those without merit: for merit itself is offensive. arrogance inspirational philosphy Friedrich Nietzsche
0d36fa9 Kindness is strength. Good-nature is often mistaken for virtue, and good health sometimes passes for genius. Anger blows out the lamp of the mind. In the examination of a great and important question, every one should be serene, slow-pulsed, and calm. Intelligence is not the foundation of arrogance. Insolence is not logic. Epithets are the arguments of malice. arrogance epithets genius good-nature insolence intelligence kindness logic malice serene strength virtue Robert Green Ingersoll
bd990e3 Through a strange kind of geographic arrogance, Europeans like to think that the world was a silent, dark, unknown place until they trooped out and discovered it. arrogance exploration Tahir Shah
f486b09 One of the questions asked by al-Balkhi, and often repeated to this day, is this: Why do the children of Israel continue to suffer? My grandmother Dodo thought it was because the were jealous. The seder for Passover (which is a shame-faced simulacrum of a Hellenic question-and-answer session, even including the wine) tells the children that it's one of those things that happens to every Jewish generation. After the or or Holocaust, many rabbis tried to tell the survivors that the immolation had been a punishment for 'exile,' or for insufficient attention to the Covenant. This explanation was something of a flop with those whose parents or children had been the raw material for the 'proof,' so for a time the professional interpreters of god's will went decently quiet. This interval of ambivalence lasted until the war of 1967, when it was announced that the divine purpose could be discerned after all. How wrong, how foolish, to have announced its discovery prematurely! The exile and the Shoah could now both be understood, as part of a heavenly if somewhat roundabout scheme to recover the Western Wall in Jerusalem and other pieces of biblically mandated real estate. I regard it as a matter of self-respect to spit in public on rationalizations of this kind. (They are almost as repellent, in their combination of arrogance, masochism, and affected false modesty, as Edith Stein's 'offer' of her life to expiate the regrettable unbelief in Jesus of her former fellow Jews.) The sage Jews are those who have put religion behind them and become in so many societies the leaven of the secular and the atheist. arrogance atheism bible biblical-covenant children christianity divine-retribution edith-stein exile false-modesty gentiles grandmothers hellenism hiwi-al-balkhi holocaust jealousy jerusalem jesus judaism martyrdom masochism passover passover-seder punishment rabbis rationalisation religion secularism self-respect six-day-war suffering survivors theodicy war western-wall will-of-god wine Christopher Hitchens
369255d The arrogance and brutality of empire are not repealed when they temporarily get deployed in a just cause. arrogance brutality imperialism united-states war war-on-terror Michael Kazin
54f7903 He was one of those young men who possess an impressive store of facts, but no truths. arrogance education John Howard Griffin
4398fcc Houses built on bridges are scandals. A bridge wants to not be. If it could choose its shape, a bridge would be no shape, an unspace to link One-place-town to Another-place-town over a river or a road or a tangle of railway tracks or a quarry, or to attach an island to another island or to the continent from which it strains. The dream of a bridge is of a woman standing at one side of a gorge and stepping out as if her job is to die, but when her foot falls it meets the ground right on the other side. A bridge is just better than no bridge but its horizon is gaplessness, and the fact of itself should still shame it. But someone had built on this bridge, drawn attention to its matter and failure. An arrogance that thrilled me. arrogance bridge bridge-dreams bridges bridging continent dream failure gaplessness houses-on-bridges island quarry railway-tracks river road shape unspace China Miéville