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The only evil we can hate without fear of harming some good is that which is rooted in pride.
Man believes that his helplessness is the measure of things.
What we discover as we age is not the vanity of everything – but of almost everything.
What I dislike is not selfishness alone. It is the audaciousness with which certain selfish men, ignorant of their own selfishness and with much pretense, dare to demand from us something they want, with the good conscience of one begging alms for pious works.
Man assures himself that life vilifies him in order to hide the fact that it merely reveals him.
The scent of the sin of pride attracts man like blood attracts a wild beast.
An egoist may not understand what is best for himself, but at least he does not act as though he knows what is best for everyone else.
Every cry of human pride ends as a cry of anguish.
No one should dare, without trembling, to influence anyone’s destiny.
To satisfy man’s pride is perhaps easier than our pride imagines.
Egoism is the debased and more popular version of individuality.
Vanity unites us, vanity binds us and vanity tears us apart.
Protestantism is a smug Christianity.
What matters to nearly everyone is not that they are right, but that they are considered by others to be right.
Today, the man who does not have a lofty opinion of himself is believed to be two-faced.
Man deems “absurd” anything that defies or rejects his secretly harbored pretension of omnipotence.
Petulance is common in the individual who becomes important, and in the nation that ceases to be.
Honor is the respectable cloak of vanity.
“Reconciling man to himself”- the most accurate definition of stupidity.
The gods punish not the pursuit of happiness, but the ambition to forge it with our own hands.
Those who seek approval rarely return to their loneliness without regrets, resentment, and bitterness. Nobody can approve of us correctly: bland praise is worse than being censured. Only we know the extent of our defects and find our qualities suspect. Our hands alone can fashion crowns and there is no greater triumph than the solitary exultation of our souls. What do I care about your compliments, if I condemn myself, or your denials, if I acquit myself? Ah! If only the one who regarded us with surprise or indignance knew what insecurity our pride attempts to conceal.
When someone of trusted intelligence praises someone we judge inferior to ourselves, our vanity enjoys an exquisite satisfaction.
To appreciate our inferiors is to tacitly admire ourselves.
The refusal to admire is the mark of the beast.
At times we doubt the sincerity of a person who flatters us, but never the truth of his flattery.
The incorrigible political error of the man of good will is to naively suppose that at every moment he can do what he must do.
Here, where what is necessary is usually impossible.
The self-important man’s lack of importance is for us sufficient revenge.
The three hypostases of egoism are: individualism, nationalism, collectivism.
The democratic trinity.
The worst disappointment: the individual we found interesting because their opinions seemed to contradict their natures and interests, and then it suddenly becomes clear that all this time they believed themselves to be unique. A way of regarding oneself which suggests that they are actually quite ordinary and typical.
We tend to call ‘gibberish’ any discussion at a higher level than our own.
Man bears persecution more easily than indifference.
Is there anything the modern clergyman wont do to attract a little attention?
The best thing about the United States is a confused but profound sense of the importance of each man.
It is a kind of primitive humanism, an elemental liberalism.
From a certain type of American, there easily springs forth a demand for independence, and an impossibility of accepting anything his conscience does not ordain.
The danger of that naive individualism lies in the confidence it brings. It makes for fertile ground for the germination of ridiculous doctrines and sects, the kind that are not tempered by any criticism or disturbed by any irony.
Among the inventions of human pride, eventually one will slip in that destroys them all.
He who stubbornly insists on understanding more than can be understood is the one who understands least.
In order to challenge God, man puffs up his emptiness.
Vanity is not an affirmation, but a question.
Remember that you are only a part of this world, a part of society, a part of the human spirit. The foolish pride of the soul, which becomes indignant at any limitation, suggests you forget your status as a man. But in doing this you only open yourself to harm.
Man is made vain by his works, because he forgets that although what he makes is his own, the capacity to make it is not.
Modern man is not as proud as he is presumptuous.
Criticism of the bourgeois receives twice the applause:
From the Marxist, who thinks we are intelligent because we confirm his prejudices,
and from the bourgeois, who thinks we are right because he has his neighbor in mind.
The anonymity of modern society obliges everyone to pretend to be important.
Very few carry themselves with the discretion appropriate to their insignificance.
No one is more insufferable than a man who does not suspect, once in a while, that he might not be right.
Loyalty to a doctrine is loyalty to whatever interpretation we make of it.
Only loyalty to a person frees us from the ways in which we indulge ourselves.
The punishment of the man who searches for himself is that he finds himself.
Whoever is curious as to the measure of his stupidity, let him count the number of things that seem obvious.
The only attribute that can without any hesitation be denied man is divinity.
But that sacrilegious pretension, nevertheless, is the ferment of his history, of his destiny, of his essence.
No one is important for a long time without eventually becoming a fool.
Pretending to know more than one knows is what tends to make religious discourse unbearable.
Everybody feels superior to what they do, because they believe they are superior to what they are.
Nobody believes that he is what little he really is.
Condemning oneself is no less pretentious than absolving oneself.
Perhaps there is no greater vanity, nor any so common, than feeling each day capable of giving fresh new opinions, as if who we are is not obvious and predictable.
Nothing is more irritating than the confidence with which a man who has had success in one thing offers his opinion on everything.
Every nonconformist knows, in the depths of his soul, that the place his vanity rejects is the exact place his nature has fixed for him.
Man’s dreams are not impossible, nor blameworthy; what is impossible and blameworthy is when man believes he is capable of satisfying them.
We deem selfish those who refuse to sacrifice themselves to our selfishness.
I have only one theme: pride.
Every stain is a trace of this.
Note: Dávila was a Colombian political philosopher and in the Latin church. His aphorisms are presented here for the purposes of enjoyment, study, and historical record, but do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this writer. For more information on Dávila, see this introductory post. For information on how to live your life, go to church and read the Church Fathers/Saints.
Featured image: Marbled paper by Gail Ritter. source
