74 Inspiring Pride Quotes

In the tapestry of human identity, pride weaves a vibrant and resilient thread, celebrating the strength and beauty inherent in authenticity. Our curated collection of 74 inspiring pride quotes serves as a beacon of empowerment and inclusivity, offering reflections that uplift the spirit and remind us of the value in embracing our true selves. Whether you belong to the LGBTQ+ community or stand as an ally, these quotes resonate with universal themes of courage, love, and self-discovery. Join us on this journey of inspiration and reflection, as we honor the diverse voices and stories that enrich our world and fuel the enduring spirit of pride.

1. “Vanity and pride are different things, though the words are often used synonymously. A person may be proud without being vain. Pride relates more to our opinion of ourselves, vanity to what we would have others think of us.” - Jane Austen

2. “We've got to have rules and obey them. After all, we're not savages. We're English, and the English are best at everything.” - William Golding

3. “As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.” - C.S. Lewis

4. “I would always rather be happy than dignified.” - Charlotte Brontë

5. “But to mean it when I say that I want my life to count for His glory is to drive a stake through the heart of self - a painful and determined dying to me that must be a part of every day I live.” - Louie Giglio

6. “Adieu to disappointment and spleen. What are men to rocks and mountains?” - Jane Austen

7. “The proud person always wants to do the right thing, the great thing. But because he wants to do it in his own strength, he is fighting not with man, but with God.” - Soren A. Kierkegaard

8. “Pride makes us long for a solution to things – a solution, a purpose, a final cause; but the better telescopes become, the more stars appear.” - Julian Barnes

9. “Pride is the chalice into which all human sins are poured: it glitters and jingles and its arabesque lures your gaze, while your lips involuntarily touch the seductive beverage.” - Vladimir Odoevsky

10. “When dealing with people, remember you are not dealing with creatures of logic, but with creatures bristling with prejudice and motivated by pride and vanity.” - Dale Carnegie

11. “Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune. ” - Carl Gustav Jung

12. “Let him submit to me! Only the god of death is so relentless, Death submits to no one—so mortals hate him most of all the gods. Let him bow down to me! I am the greater king, I am the elder-born, I claim—the greater man.” - Homer

13. “There's a lot of pride involved in my refusal to believe in god.” - Orhan Pamuk

14. “Offspring were a joy or a shame, but still the crown of their elders, nature's unpredictable creatures.” - Achy Obejas

15. “Today, it felt like time should be measured by how much of the future she had left, and needed to be counted forward. She felt proud listening, as if somehow Jonathan Parish's speech reflected on her, as if she could take credit for some part of it, for him.” - Michael Stein

16. “He was proud of her, he admired her, and at that moment he was conscious of life as something good and he fell in love with her all over again. This consciousness of love took the form of a deep patience inhabiting him, rather than a feeling of cheer or even hope” - Michael Stein

17. “Pride costs us more than hunger, thirst, and cold.” - Thomas Jefferson

18. “The less worth of a man,the greater his pride.” - Yukito Kishiro

19. “Any pride or haughtiness, is displeasing to us, merely because it shocks our own pride, and leads us by sympathy into comparison, which causes the disagreeable passion of humility.” - David Hume

20. “Leave your pride, ego, and narcissism somewhere else. Reactions from those parts of you will reinforce your children's most primitive fears.” - Dr. Henry Cloud & Dr. John Townsend

21. “In the history of the world many souls have been, are, and will be, and with a little reflection this is marvelous and not depressing. Many jerks are made gloomy about it, for they think quantity buries them alive. That's just crazy. Numbers are very dangerous, but the main thing about them is that they humble your pride. And that's good.” - Saul Bellow

22. “We are rarely proud when we are alone.” - Voltaire

23. “O, sir,' murmured Sheila, still on her knees, 'please forgive me.''Forgive you! 0, la, la, la!' cunningly cried the droll, and strutting like an actor. 'Forgiveness is easy, is it not? O, yes, it is nothing. You are a young woman full of pride. O. yes! - but that is nothing. And full of penitence, and that is nothing, too. Pride is nothing, penitence nothing, forgiveness nothing, but even a bargain in farthings must be paid to be made, and I am a plain business man. What costs nothing brings no balm, and you would not like that, you would not like that, now would you?' (“The Bogey Man”)” - A.E. Coppard

24. “Pride is the mother of arrogance.” - Toba Beta

25. “For men, the softer emotions are always intertwined with power and pride. That was why Karna waited for me to plead with him though he could have stopped my suffering with a single world. That was why he turned on me when I refused to ask for his pity. That was why he incited Dussasan to an action that was against the code of honor by which he lived his life. He knew he would regret it—in his fierce smile there had already been a glint of pain.But was a woman's heart any purer, in the end?That was the final truth I learned. All this time I'd thought myself better than my father, better than all those men who inflicted harm on a thousand innocents in order to punish the one man who had wronged them. I'd thought myself above the cravings that drove him. But I, too, was tainted with them, vengeance encoded into my blood. When the moment came I couldn't resist it, no more than a dog can resist chewing a bone that, splintering, makes his mouth bleed.Already I was storing these lessons inside me. I would use them over the long years of exile to gain what I wanted, no matter what its price.But Krishna, the slippery one, the one who had offered me a different solace, Krishna with his disappointed eyes—what was the lesson he'd tried to teach?” - Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

26. “Pride helps us; and pride is not a bad thing when it only urges us to hide our own hurts—not to hurt others.” - George Eliot

27. “My father told me once that the most important thing every man should know is what he would die for.” - Tana French

28. “There were sins whose fascination was more in the memory than in the doing of them, strange triumphs that gratified the pride more than the passions, and gave to the intellect a quickened sense of joy, greater than any joy they brought, or could ever bring, to the senses.” - Oscar Wilde

29. “It was time to bring out the world destructive weapons. It was now time to hit him where it would do the biggest damage, his pride.” - Ottilie Weber

30. “What do you mean, 'Angle of Repose?' she asked me when I dreamed we were talking about Grandmother's life, and I said it was the angle at which a man or woman finally lies down. I suppose it is; and yet ... I thought when I began, and still think, that there was another angle in all those years when she was growing old and older and very old, and Grandfather was matching her year for year, a separate line that did not intersect with hers. They were vertical people, they lived by pride, and it is only by the ocular illusion of perspective that they can be said to have met. But he had not been dead two months when she lay down and died too, and that may indicate that at that absolute vanishing point they did intersect. They had intersected for years, for more than he especially would ever admit.” - Wallace Stegner

31. “The first key to leadership was self-control, particularly the mastery of pride, which was something more difficult, he explained, to subdue than a wild lion and anger, which was more difficult to defeat than the greatest wrestler. He warned them that "if you can't swallow your pride, you can't lead.” - Jack Weatherford

32. “The only way I could endure being a coward was if I was the only one who knew it.” - Pat Conroy

33. “An exceedingly confident student would in theory make a terrible student. Why would he take school seriously when he feels that he can outwit his teachers?” - Criss Jami

34. “Every man has a specific skill, whether it is discovered or not, that more readily and naturally comes to him than it would to another, and his own should be sought and polished. He excels best in his niche - originality loses its authenticity in one's efforts to obtain originality.” - Criss Jami

35. “Pride of opinion has been responsible for the downfall of more men on Wall Street than any other factor.” - Charles Dow

36. “America is a young dumb country and it needs all kinds of help. America is a dumb puppy with big teeth that bite and hurt. And we take care of America. We hold America to our bosom; we feed America, we make love to America. There wouldn't be an America if it wasn't for black people. So you have some dedicated black Americans who will die a million deaths to save America. And this is home for us. We don't know really about Africa. We talk it in a romantic sense, but America is it. And so, America is always going to be okay as long as black people don't totally lose their mind, cause we'll pick up the pieces and turn it into a new dance.” - Abiodun Oyewole

37. “Pride is all very well, but a sausage is a sausage.” - Terry Pratchett

38. “The tyrant is a child of PrideWho drinks from his sickening cup Recklessness and vanity,Until from his high crest headlongHe plummets to the dust of hope.” - Sophocles

39. “The heart of the Pharisee is within us all, to redefine God's law so it doesn't apply to me anymore. It applies to my neighbor but not to me.” - Ron Pearce

40. “The heart of the world is breaking under this load of pride and pretense. There is no release from our burden apart from the meekness of Christ.” - A.W. Tozer

41. “You wear your honor like a suit of armor... You think it keeps you safe, but all it does is weigh you down and make it hard for you to move.” - George R.R. Martin

42. “I am, when you stop to think of it, a member of a fairly select group: the final handful of American novelists who learned to read and write before they learned to eat a daily helping of video bullshit.” - Stephen King

43. “We used to languish when we walked, or sidle down the street like dogs that have just done something wrong. Now Rube walks upright, because he's on the attack.” - Markus Zusak

44. “Love hath no pride.” - Karen Marie Moning

45. “We fundamentalists are a pack of mood-loving showoffs. I'm sure the Minor Prophets would have found subject for correction.” - Elisabeth Elliot

46. “Because he had been- and in many ways still was- such a brilliant man, he no doubt understood the nature of his memory problem. It wasn't pride that prevented him from asking for help but a deep aversion to causing more trouble than necessary for those of us who lived in the normal world.” - Yoko Ogawa

47. “The wretch, concentred all in self,Living, shall forfeit fair renown,And, doubly dying, shall go downTo the vile dust, from whence he sprung,Unwept, unhonored, and unsung.” - Walter Scott

48. “For our face and body were beautiful. Our face was not like the faces of our brothers, for we felt not pity when looking upon it. Our body was not like the bodies of our brothers, for our limbs were straigth and thin and hard and strong. And we thought that we could trust this being who looked upon us from the stream, and that we had nothing to fear with this being.” - Ayn Rand

49. “The power of the sky can be made to do men's bidding. There are no limits to its secrets and its might, and it can be made to grant us anything if we but choose to ask.” - Ayn Rand

50. “Their eyes were dark and hard and glowing, with no fear in them, no kindness and no guilt.” - Ayn Rand

51. “I am done with the monster of "We," the word of serfdom, of plunder, of misery, falsehood and shame.And now I see the face of god, and I raise this god over the earth, this god whom men have sought since men came into being, this god who will grant them joy and peace and pride.This god, this one word:"I.” - Ayn Rand

52. “Such kindness wasn't a gift but a goad, scraping against one's skin like a yoke of thorns. She would have preferred him stiff, defensive, even offensive.” - Lauren Willig

53. “What is called family pride is often founded on the illusion of self-love. A man wishes to perpetuate and immortalize himself.” - Alexis de Tocqueville

54. “Some people would rather die in their pride, than live in their humility.” - Anthony Liccione

55. “Certainly the most destructive vice if you like, that a person can have. More than pride, which is supposedly the number one of the cardinal sins - is self pity. Self pity is the worst possible emotion anyone can have. And the most destructive. It is, to slightly paraphrase what Wilde said about hatred, and I think actually hatred's a subset of self pity and not the other way around - ' It destroys everything around it, except itself '. Self pity will destroy relationships, it'll destroy anything that's good, it will fulfill all the prophecies it makes and leave only itself. And it's so simple to imagine that one is hard done by, and that things are unfair, and that one is underappreciated, and that if only one had had a chance at this, only one had had a chance at that, things would have gone better, you would be happier if only this, that one is unlucky. All those things. And some of them may well even be true. But, to pity oneself as a result of them is to do oneself an enormous disservice.I think it's one of things we find unattractive about the american culture, a culture which I find mostly, extremely attractive, and I like americans and I love being in america. But, just occasionally there will be some example of the absolutely ravening self pity that they are capable of, and you see it in their talk shows. It's an appalling spectacle, and it's so self destructive. I almost once wanted to publish a self help book saying 'How To Be Happy by Stephen Fry : Guaranteed success'. And people buy this huge book and it's all blank pages, and the first page would just say - ' Stop Feeling Sorry For Yourself - And you will be happy '. Use the rest of the book to write down your interesting thoughts and drawings, and that's what the book would be, and it would be true. And it sounds like 'Oh that's so simple', because it's not simple to stop feeling sorry for yourself, it's bloody hard. Because we do feel sorry for ourselves, it's what Genesis is all about.” - Stephen Fry

56. “"Still, not to be English is hardly regarded as a fatal deficiency even by the English, though grave enough to warrant sympathy.” - Beryl Markham

57. “The warrior who goes off to battle should not boast as the one who returns from it.” - Richard Paul Evans

58. “...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.” - Timothy Keller

59. “I was always a dreamer, in childhood especially. People thought I was a little strange.” - Charley Pride

60. “Pride slays thanksgiving ... A prideful man is seldom a grateful man, for he never thinks he gets as much as he deserves.” - Henry Ward Beecher

61. “At the end of the day, if pride is your greatest strength, turn it into vanity.” - Lionel Suggs

62. “Do not believe that you alone can be right.The man who thinks that,The man who maintains that only he has the powerTo reason correctly, the gift to speak, the soul—A man like that, when you know him, turns out empty.” - Sophocles

63. “When we fail, our pride supports us, and when we succeed it betrays us.” - Charles Colton

64. “It's much easier on the emotions when one sees life as an experiment rather than a struggle for popularity.” - Criss Jami

65. “Love can either be your greatest companion or your worst enemy, depending on your pride to accept or deny things.” - Anthony Liccione

66. “The only way to prevent pride from taking root in our heart and our life is to embrace a life filled with faith, understanding, and forgiveness.” - Heather Bixler

67. “Pride is often used as a way to protect our hearts and to hide the truth. Pride causes us to shut down and build walls.” - Heather Bixler

68. “You can't take credit for your talents, but it matters that you use them. You can't really be blamed for your weaknesses, but it matters that you correct them. So pride and shame don't make a lot of sense, in the final analysis, but they weren't much fun anyway.” - Sam Harris

69. “You need that pride in yourself, as well as a sense, when you are sitting on Page 297 of a book, that the book is going to be read, that somebody is going to care. You can't ever be sure about that, but you need the sense that it's important, that it's not typing; it's writing.” - Roger Kahn

70. “Materialism, attachment to things of the world, includes pride. Many religious people suffer from pride: taking pleasure or even delight in being good, or religious.” - Idries Shah

71. “Instead of being proud that you led someone to God, be more concerned with the person you pushed away from Him.” - Donna Lynn Hope

72. “A session of boasting won't attract any real friends.  It will set you up on a pedestal, however, making you a clearer target.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

73. “Don't force to become the top, but loosen up to be the top....(as in don't try hard when people are before you but be glad... instead of working up your energy for the highest honor)” - Florie Jo Alicer

74. “There is no greater enemy than pride.” - Sanskrit