Top 100 Quotes About Conceit
#1. The generality of friends puts us out of conceit with friendship; just as the generality of religious people puts us out of conceit with religion.
Francois De La Rochefoucauld
#2. What mortal is there of us, who would find his satisfaction enhanced by an opportunity of comparing the picture he presents to himself of his doings, with the picture they make on the mental retina of his neighbours? We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit.
George Eliot
#3. Ere I was old? Ah woeful Ere,
Which tells me, Youth's no longer here!
O Youth! for years so many and sweet,
'Tis known that Thou and I were one,
I'll think it but a fond conceit
It cannot be that Thou art gone!
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
#4. What you believe might be wrong; what you don't believe might be right! Don't be sure of things! Doubt! Investigate! Leave your stupid conceit that your belief is an absolute truth! Open your mind to all the possibilities!
Mehmet Murat Ildan
#5. The fatal conceit of most spies is to believe they are loved, in a relationship between equals, and not merely manipulated.
Ben Macintyre
#6. In his library he had been always sure of leisure and tranquility; and though prepared, as he told Elizabeth, to meet with folly and conceit in every other room in the house, he was used to be free from them there
Jane Austen
#7. Average men and women don't really exist except as a statistical conceit.
John Taylor Gatto
#8. Infatuated, half through conceit, half through love of my art, I achieve the impossible working as no one else ever works.
Alexandre Dumas
#9. Do nothing out of rivalry or conceit, but in humility consider others as more important than yourselves. 4 Everyone should look out not only for his own interests, but also for the interests of others.
Anonymous
#10. The Field of Dreams conceit is especially popular in Silicon Valley, where engineers are biased toward building cool stuff rather than selling it. But customers will not come just because you build it. You have to make that happen, and it's harder than it looks.
Peter Thiel
#11. The idea that an author can extricate her or his own ongoing life experience from the tale being written is a conceit of very little worth.
Steven Erikson
#12. There are elements of that, where you'll see a scene again and you'll recognize it, but I wouldn't say it's got one conceit like that, at all. It definitely has those jokes, but it would be wrong to say this is a show where, every time you see it, you see a new angle.
Mitchell Hurwitz
#14. When strong, avoid them. If of high morale, depress them. Seem humble to fill them with conceit. If at ease, exhaust them. If united, separate them. Attack their weaknesses. Emerge to their surprise.
Sun Tzu
#15. I thought at the time that I couldn't be horrified anymore, or wounded. I suppose that's a common conceit, that you've already been so damaged that damage itself, in its totality, makes you safe.
Lionel Shriver
#16. As children must have the hooping cough, the college youth must pass through the stage of conceit in which he holds in slight esteem the wisdom of the best.
John Lancaster Spalding
#17. Mr Harrington was a bore. He exasperated Ashenden, and enraged him; he got on his nerves, and drove him to frenzy. But Ashenden did not dislike him. His self-satisfaction was enormous but so ingenuous that you could not resent it; his conceit was so childlike that you could only smile at it.
W. Somerset Maugham
#18. Fools dwelling in darkness, wise in their own conceit, are puffed up with vain knowledge, go round and round, staggering to and fro, like blind men led by the blind.
Gopi Krishna
#19. You must remember, too," he added, "that we deal with no ordinary criminal, but with the second greatest brain in the world." I forbore to pander to his conceit by asking the obvious question.
Agatha Christie
#20. The idea that even the brightest person or group of bright people, much less the U.S. Congress, can wisely manage an economy has to be the height of arrogance and conceit.
Walter E. Williams
#21. There is nothing like a good bit of pain for taking the conceit out of one.
Jane Welsh Carlyle
#22. [It is] the most hideous waterfront structure ever inflicted on a city by a combination of architectural conceit and official bad taste. the Cathedral of Asphalt.
Robert Moses
#23. A lot of men who have accepted - or had imposed upon them in boyhood - the old English public school styles of careful modesty in speech, with much understatement, have behind their masks an appalling and impregnable conceit of themselves.
J.B. Priestley
#24. Conceit may puff a man up, but never prop him up.
John Ruskin
#26. The first Degree of Folly, is to conceit one's self wise; the second to profess it; the third to despise Counsel.
Benjamin Franklin
#27. Let them look up in the sky then ... ! if they must be so blind, that cannot see the truth in broad daylight, but must have the whole world in darkness to see the conceit of the stars ...
William Gaddis
#28. I think it'd be pretty unrealistic to think we're the only planet in the world with thinking beings. It's kind of a strange conceit. Especially given how many universes there must be.
Max Minghella
#29. The best and the worst thing about fashion is that anyone can do it. But because fashion can be the most unintellectual thing, you have to turn it into an intellectual exercise just for your own sanity. You have to start with a conceit.
Joseph Altuzarra
#30. Self-love is the source of that ignorant conceit of knowledge which is always doing and never succeeding.
Plato
#31. Till swollen with cunning, of a self-conceit,
His waxen wings did mount above his reach,
And, melting, Heavens conspir'd his overthrow.
Christopher Marlowe
#32. I love her and hate her at the same time. I even love the parts of her that I hate, her vitality and her colour, her disruption and disorder, her humour and her despair, her conceit and her narcissism, her everything that isn't me.
Poppy Adams
#33. It is a mother's noble conceit to believe she has the power to take her child's suffering and do it for him.
Kadiatou Diallo
#34. Conceit is a disease That the doctors got no cure They've done a lot of research on it But what it is, they're still not sure.
Evan Esar
#35. A Conceit
Give me your hand
Make room for me
to lead and follow
you
beyond this rage of poetry.
Let others have
the privacy of
touching words
and love of loss
of love.
For me
Give me your hand.
Maya Angelou
#36. Above all, you must fight conceit, envy, and every kind of ill-feeling in your heart.
Abraham Cahan
#37. In life, as on the stage, it's not who I am but what I do that's the measure of my worth and the secret of my success. All the rest is showiness, arrogance and conceit.
Stella Adler
#38. As when on some secluded branch in forest far and wide sits perched an owl, who, full of self-conceit and self-created wisdom, explains, comments, condemns, ordains and order things not understood, yet full of importance still holds forth to stocks and stones around - so sits and scribbles Mike.
Michael Faraday
#39. You have a good many little gifts and virtues, but there is no need of parading them, for conceit spoils the finest genius. There is not much danger that real talent or goodness will be overlooked long, and the great charm of all power is modesty.
Louisa May Alcott
#40. For those who do not write and who never have been stirred by the creative urge, talk of muses seems a figure of speech, a quaint conceit, but for those of us who live by the Word, our muses are as real and necessary as the soft clay of language which they help to sculpt.
Dan Simmons
#42. Paris was sad. One of the saddest towns: weary of its now-mechanical sensuality, weary of the tension of money, money, money, weary even of resentment and conceit, just weary to death, and still not sufficiently Americanized or Londonized to hide the weariness under a mechanical jig-jig-jig!
D.H. Lawrence
#43. There was never an angler who lived but that there was a fish capable of taking the conceit out of him.
Zane Grey
#44. One in whose head is conceit, Think not that he will ever listen to truth.
Bill Vaughan
#45. I like Australia less and less. The hateful newness, the democratic conceit, every man a little pope of perfection.
D.H. Lawrence
#46. There is a difference between conceit and confidence. Conceit is bragging about yourself. Confidence means you believe you can get the job done.
Johnny Unitas
#48. Lay aside all conceit Learn to read the book of Nature for yourself. Those who have succeeded best have followed for years some slim thread which once in a while has broadened out and disclosed some treasure worth a life-long search.
Louis Agassiz
#49. Religion is a solace to many and it is conceivable that some religion, somewhere, is Ultimate Truth. But being religious is often a form of conceit. The
Robert A. Heinlein
#50. We are poor plants buoyed up by the air-vessels of our own conceit: alas for us, if we get a few pinches that empty us of that windy self-subsistence.
George Eliot
#51. The cynics were watchdogs terrifying malefactors. They tried to expose falseness and conceit. That's why their name is still spoken with a snarl.
Petr Skrabanek
#52. I'm not conceited. Conceit is a fault and I have no faults.
David Lee Roth
#53. If I see my films described as 'quirky' or, even worse, 'snarky' one more time, I'm going to probably seriously consider an early retirement. All these years, I've labored under the conceit that they were darkly humorous.'
Terry Zwigoff
#54. Arrogance and Conceit are the mother and father of a closed mind.
Charles Jennings, "Journey of the Chosen".
Richard Nance
#55. When you go to church you are really listening-in to the secret wireless from out friends: that is why the enemy is so anxious to prevent us from going. He does it by playing on our conceit and laziness and intellectual snobbery.
C.S. Lewis
#56. Perhaps there is no conceit so arrogant as the conceit which follows a conviction of emancipation.
Margaret Deland
#57. Arrogance is perhaps the most socially acceptable form of sin in the church today. In this culture of abundance, one of the only ways Satan can keep Christians neutralized is to wrap us up in pride. Conceit slips in like drafts of cold air in the winter. We don't see it, but outsiders can sense it.
David Kinnaman
#58. He didn't have the loose-limbed cockiness of a man her age, springing to attention with the desire to impress everyone with his agility and form. No, the stranger moved with a languorous arrogance of a man more settled into his skin. A sort of graceful conceit that suggested entitlement.
Vivienne Lorret
#59. Of great wealth there is no real use, except in its distribution, the rest is just conceit.
Francis Bacon
#60. Conceit is an outward manifestation of inferiority.
Noel Coward
#61. It is well for us that we are born babies in intellect. Could we understand half what mothers say and do to their infants, we should be filled with a conceit of our own importance, which would render us insupportable through life.
Augustus Hare
#62. It is humiliating to have to confess that this conceit of Peter was one of his most fascinating qualities. To put it with brutal frankness, there never was a cockier boy.
J.M. Barrie
#63. Talent is God given. Be humble. Fame is man-given. Be grateful. Conceit is self-given. Be careful.
John Wooden
#64. Self-conceit may lead to self destruction.
Aesop
#65. The conceit of man was explained by this storm to be the very engine of life. One
Stephen Crane
#68. So it is very helpful to begin to recognize this comparing mind, this conceit of "I'm better than" or "I'm worse than" someone else. When we do not see it clearly, it becomes the source of much suffering. It makes us feel separated and apart from others; we reinforce the contraction of self.
Joseph Goldstein
#69. Even Orlando (who had no conceit of her person) knew it, for she smiled the involuntary smile which women smile when their own beauty, which seems not their own, forms like a drop falling or a fountain rising and confronts them all of a sudden in the glass.
Virginia Woolf
#70. ...But even then you have to reckon with a criminal's chief vice.'
'What is that?'
' Conceit. A criminal never believes that his crime can fail.
Agatha Christie
#71. The more cruel the wrong that men commit against an individual or a people, the deeper their hatred and contempt for their victim. Conceit and false pride on the part of a nation prevent the rise of remorse for its crime.
Albert Einstein
#73. Many said selfishness was the flaw of our modern age; but then self-conceit emerged from a corner of the deepest hell to join selfishness.
Franz Grillparzer
#74. Expecting conceit they found courtesy. Expecting arrogance they found a man concerned with people's thoughts and feelings.
Jackie Collins
#75. Often Satan injects pride into the believer's spirit, evoking in him an attitude of self-importance and of self-conceit. He causes him to esteem himself a very outstanding person, one who is indispensable in God's work. Such a spirit constitutes one of the major reasons for the fall of believers.
Watchman Nee
#76. Your young white, who gathers his learning from books and can measure what he knows by the page, may conceit that his knowledge, like his legs, outruns that of his fathers', but, where experience is the master, the scholar is made to know the value of years, and respects them accordingly.
James Fenimore Cooper
#77. Among pernicious myths is the one where people always get very upbeat and generous and other-directed right before they eliminate their own map for keeps. The truth is that the hours before a suicide are usually an interval of enormous conceit and self-involvement.
David Foster Wallace
#78. It was a conceit to imagine that they knew the world; that they knew its every detail. Forces ever worked unseen, in elusive patterns no mortal mind could comprehend.
Steven Erikson
#79. She had believed that she alone could touch his heart, and that likewise his was the only gaze that would ever reach hers. She had left her home in response to his kind words, only to find that this belief had been nothing but the conceit of an ignorant girl.
Noriko Ogiwara
#80. Genius consisting neither in self-conceit nor in humilty, but in a power to making or do, not anything in general, but something in particular.
George Eliot
#81. ...I mistrust folk who are always bringing God or Christ into their conversations. If it is not an actual blasphemy it is at least a presumption. It smacks of self-conceit, doesn't it?
Winston Graham
#82. A man is a fool who sits looking backward from himself in the past. Ah, what shallow, vain conceit there is in man! Forget the things that are behind. That is not where you live. Your roots are not there. They are in the present; and you should reach up into the other life.
Henry Ward Beecher
#83. Forfeit your sense of awe, let your conceit diminish your ability to revere, and the universe becomes a market place for you.
Abraham Joshua Heschel
#85. Self-conceit is a weighty quality, and will sometimes bring down the scale when there is nothing else in it. It magnifies a fault beyond proportion, and swells every omission into an outrage.
Jeremy Collier
#86. The conceit of literary intellectuals is to imagine that other people don't have ideas so that they can assume a superior status by having their own...
Nicholas Mosley
#87. Success seems to be that which forms the distinction between confidence and conceit.
Charles Caleb Colton
#88. He nods solemnly and repeats the stock response of the Housing Committee whenever they address the perpetual shortage of apartments in Leningrad. Privacy is a conceit of degenerate societies.
Debra Dean
#89. The first sin in our universe was Lucifer's self conceit.
Thomas Carlyle
#90. I felt in my bones that Alfred Kazin was right to suggest that 'the deepest side of being American is the sense of being like nothing before us in history' - a historical conceit that privileged biography as the narrative of the exceptionalist experience.
David Levering Lewis
#91. The belief that we can manage the Earth and improve on Nature is probably the ultimate expression of human conceit, but it has deep roots in the past and is almost universal.
Rene Dubos
#92. The being called God ... bears every mark of a veil woven by philosophical conceit, to hide the ignorance of philosophers even from themselves. They borrow the threads of its texture from the anthropomorphism of the vulgar.
Percy Bysshe Shelley
#93. It is a characteristic conceit of our species to put human face on random cosmic violence.
Carl Sagan
#94. Calm self-confidence is as far from conceit as the desire to earn a decent living is remote from greed.
Channing Pollock
#95. Conceit and arrogance are acquired states of mind. Conquer acquired states of mind, and basic sanity can unfold. Passion and willfulness are part of false consciousness; erase false consciousness, and true consciousness will appear.
Zicheng Hong
#96. The sea is masculine, the type of active strength. Look, what egg-shells are drifting all over it, each one, like ours, filled with men in ecstasies of terror, alternating with cockney conceit, as the sea is rough or smooth. Is this sad-colored circle an eternal cemetery?
Ralph Waldo Emerson
#97. I take the greatest lesson from compassion - it takes away all the conceit out of my life.
Sri Chinmoy
#98. A certain amount of distrust is wholesome, but not so much of others as of ourselves; neither vanity not conceit can exist in the same atmosphere with it.
Samuel Johnson
#100. We would seldom be deceived by flattery, did our own conceit not promote the delusion.
Norm MacDonald
