Quotes About Hubris

#1. Dreams of innocence are just that; they usually depend on a denial of reality that can be its own form of hubris.

Michael Pollan

#2. This is the story of Isaac and his time in America, the last turning of the centuries, when the hubris of men led them to believe they could disregard even nature itself.

Erik Larson

#3. Adam named every creature in the garden. And we've been paying for his presumption ever since.

Marty Rubin

#4. They are developing a form of renewable energy that runs on hubris.

Robin Sloan

#5. We have a name for people who create universes - they're called gods. There is no greater hubris than to think that we could take the place of godlike implications.

Gregory Benford

#6. I'm kind of concerned about 'Ego & Hubris' because I'm thinking that people will read it and maybe even be entertained by it, but at the end of it, you know, they'll wonder, 'Why did this guy write this? What was the point of it?'

Harvey Pekar

#7. So with each advance in understanding come new questions. So we need to be very humble. We shouldn't have hubris and think that we can understand everything. But history tells us that there is good reason to believe that we will continue making fantastic progress in the years ahead.

Max Tegmark

#8. It is the mark of the mind untrained to take its own processes as valid for all men, and its own judgments for absolute truth.

Aleister Crowley

#9. What is inadmissible, both morally and scientifically, is the hubris that pretends to understand the behavior of human agents without for a moment listening systematically to how they understand what they are doing and how they explain themselves.

James C. Scott

#10. There are some people who think runners are snobs. These people are called non-runners. And they're right, of course. There is a certain hubris you develop when you do things no one else does.

Jennifer Graham

#11. Do you use 'True Will' as an excuse to do nothing?
Have you declared yourself enlightened?
Damn your weak philosophies; a pox and a pestilence your despicable sloth and arrogance.

Peter J. Carroll

#12. The problem is not lack of competence, it is confidence without competence.

Paul Gibbons

#13. Experience is not the enemy: It is the hubris that is often a by-product of experience that is our greatest enemy.

Liz Wiseman

#14. Scientists in general tend to have what I would call a bit of hubris that the public do not necessarily understand. So scientists some times make claims that are misunderstood by the public.

George Coyne

#15. The scientists have given [modern man] the impression that there is nothing he cannot know, and false propagandists have told him that there is nothing he cannot have.

Richard M. Weaver

#16. I really didn't think this was going to happen. I thought bad things only happened to people with hubris. They don't happen to people like me, people that know how fragile life is, people that respect the authority of a higher power. But it has. It has happened to me.

Taylor Jenkins Reid

#17. Inscriptions here of various Names I view'd,
The greater part by hostile time subdu'd;
Yet wide was spread their fame in ages past,
And Poets once had promis'd they should last.

Alexander Pope

#18. Hubris itself will not let you be an artist.

Larry Wall

#19. They all chose Indian names for themselves. Teddy was Little Fox ("Naturally," Ursula said). Nancy was Little Wolf ("Honiahaka" in Cheyenne, Mrs. Shawcross said. She had a book she referred to). Mrs. Shawcross herself was Great White Eagle ("Oh, for heaven's sake," Sylvie said, "talk about hubris").

Kate Atkinson

#20. Don't you know about the praying mantis that waved its arms angrily in front of an approaching carriage, unaware that they were incapable of stopping it? Such was the high opinion it had of its talents.

Zhuangzi

#21. What do you think you are doing by infesting the whole world? Because I do it with one puny boat, I am called a pirate; because you do it with a great fleet, you are called an emperor.

Augustine Of Hippo

#22. Sometimes, the gods are kind. And hubris is the worst of sins.

Christian Cameron

#23. While the financial crisis destroyed careers and reputations, and left many more bruised and battered, it also left the survivors with a genuine sense of invulnerability at having made it back from the brink. Still missing in the current environment is a genuine sense of humility.

Andrew Ross Sorkin

#24. The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

Plato

#25. Unbridled talent can handicap you with hubris.

Khang Kijarro Nguyen

#26. Honesty was a thing that could never be a thing. In a blaze of hubris and misplaced enthusiasm, we kowtowed to it, thinking it would make us better people, but conveniently forgetting that an abstraction was incompatible with the specificity of a human's needs and wants.

Erin Bomboy

#27. In ancient mythology," Langdon offered, "a hero in denial is the ultimate manifestation of hubris and pride. No man is more prideful than he who believes himself immune to the dangers of the world.

Dan Brown

#28. The antidote to hubris, to overweening pride, is irony, that capacity to discover and systematize ideas.

Ralph Ellison

#29. hubris on Henry's, too much Greek prose composition - whatever

Donna Tartt

#30. Assessing the mind of a creature this alien demands that we be extraordinary flexible in our own thinking. Marine biologist James Wood suggests our hubris gets in our way.

Sy Montgomery

#31. Where I grew up - we started out in Oklahoma and then moved to Missouri - it was considered hubris to talk about yourself. And the downside of that was that ideas rarely got exchanged, or true feelings.

Brad Pitt

#32. Incumbent White House parties have won 10 of the last 18 presidential elections; the odds are tight, but they favor Obama in 2012. And so gloomy Democrats, check your despair; gleeful Republicans, watch the hubris.

Jon Meacham

#33. The Gods hate hubris in a man almost more than any trait. Remember the boastful words of Odysseus to Poseidon after the fall of Troy? He paid for it with ten years of his life, and the lives of all his men. Retract your boast before something bad happens!

Gary Corby

#34. Hubris is when God screws you over for being a smartass.

Raymond L. Atkins

#35. Religion grants its adherents malign, intoxicating and morally corrosive sensations. Destroying intellectual freedom is always evil, but only religion makes doing evil feel quite so good.

Philip Pullman

#36. And behind the good doctor, his Wall of Hubris: I counted seven framed degrees, hung with care and pride and more than a little jackassedness. Oh-ho, you don't believe I'm important, eh? Well then, how do you explain these?!?!?!

David Arnold

#37. I think self-doubt, as grim as it can be, makes me a better writer. Stasis and hubris would probably be the death knell for my career.

Kristan Higgins

#38. If you ever find yourself coming out of a time machine, run. Run away as fast you can. Don't stop. Don't try to talk. Nothing good can come out of it. narrator Charles Yu, not author Charles Yu p19

Charles Yu

#39. It was the hubris of each generation to think this anew, to think that their time was special, that all things would come to an end with them.

Hugh Howey

#40. I made as many mistakes as anybody else. I sound as if I'm an egomaniac, and I suppose in some ways I'm filled with hubris because I know how good I am at certain things. But other things, I can't do at all. I can't draw.

Harlan Ellison

#41. The first lesson every child of Athena learned: Mom was the best at everything, and you should never, ever suggest otherwise.

Rick Riordan

#42. What is technology in the end but man's futile effort to create the world in his own image?

Marty Rubin

#43. Is it hubris to believe we all live epics?

Leif Enger

#44. The exegetical foundations would appear to be weak, and one shouldn't build huge theological edifices, no matter how splendid or consistent, on weak foundations.

Ben Witherington III

#45. The Modern Self must confront the shadow of hubris.

Richard Tarnas

#46. We have lived for too long in a world, and tragically in a Church, where the wills and affections of human beings are regarded as sacrosanct as they stand, where God is required to command what we already love, and to promise what we already desire.

N. T. Wright

#47. Best not to take, yet doubt its strength,
A leash with Demons at its length.

McKenzie Bodkin

#48. Economists (and others) who are satisfied with nature-free equations develop a dangerous hubris about the potency of our species

Garrett Hardin

#49. In particular, our church will have to confront the vices of hubris, the worship of power, envy, and illusionism[28] as the roots of all evil. It will have to speak of moderation, authenticity, trust, faithfulness, steadfastness, patience, discipline, humility, modesty, contentment.[

Dietrich Bonhoeffer

#50. Such hubris could only come from a man's mouth.

Janet Morris

#51. What is more obscene: the idea that one can apologize for the hubris and deceit that is Obama and his health care, or the actual need some have for an apology from an entity so evil that he would toy with the lives of millions as though they were insects and he God? This is hard to tell.

Ilana Mercer

#52. Hubris, arrogance, is just one step ahead of loss of integrity, because if you think you're better than other people, you know more, then you're going to think, as many leaders have, that the rules don't apply to them - so they lose their integrity.

Charles Koch

#53. But who names a starship the Icarus? What kind of man possess that much hubris, that he dares it to fall?

Amie Kaufman

#54. Hubris calls for nemesis, and in one form or another it's going to get it, not as a punishment from outside but as the completion of a pattern already started.

Mary Midgley

#55. We can never be gods, after all
but we can become something less than human with frightening ease.

N.K. Jemisin

#56. We've seen the hubris. And now we're seeing the scandals.

David Gergen

#57. I think people are used to people in show business having a lot of hubris. I think I have a normal amount of self-loathing but because I'm in show business it's considered self-deprecation. In normal life I would just be considered your average neurotic.

Jon Stewart

#58. This is the very structure of sports journalism: deification and damnation, death and resurrection, failure and redemption. You succeed so you can falter so you can succeed again. We need a rise and a fall. We need hubris and retribution and recovery.

Will Leitch

#59. They didn't come to crush the city. They came to crush the hubris of its king."
"That must have hurt," Oates said. Umber pinched the bridge of his nose.
"Hubris means arrogance, you great buffoon.

P.W. Catanese

#60. The real question is why you still believe in that invisible god when a true one stands before you?

Ben Willoughby

#61. Most of you are familiar with the virtues of a programmer. There are three, of course: laziness, impatience, and hubris.

Larry Wall

#62. No experience of the failure of his policy could shake his belief in its essential excellence.

Babara Tuchman

#63. Since the end of the World War II, the United States has fought three "small" wars ... we lost all three of them and for the same reason-hubris.

Andrew Greeley

#64. The serene confidence with which Western journalists and liberal academics prescribe solutions to our [Singapore's] problems is a source of constant wonder to us.

Goh Keng Swee

#65. Having felt the piercing gash of grief and lived through it, having loved to the brink of brokenness, and having learned the difference between friendship and frivolity, one eventually takes a conscious step through the invisible membrane that separates hubris from humility ...

Eldonna Edwards

#66. It betrays hubris on the part of the artist to think his medium is limiting him, and I think we all recognize this.

Steve Albini

#67. Even great men bow before the Sun; it melts hubris into humility.

Dejan Stojanovic

#68. There is no better antidote against entertaining too high an opinion of others than having an excellent one of ourselves at the very same time.

Walter Scott

#69. I had, by thirteen, developed a sort of Taoist hubris about my ability to control via non-control.

David Foster Wallace

#70. Hubris means deadly pride. Thinking you can do things better than anyone else.

Rick Riordan

#71. Every medicine is vain.

Aeschylus

#72. Hubris, n.
Every time I call you mine, I feel like I'm forcing it, as if saying it can make it so. As if I'm reminding you, and reminding the universe: mine. As if that one word from me could have that kind of power.

David Levithan

#73. The silent killer of all great men and women of achievement - particularly men, I don't know why, maybe it's the testosterone - I think it's narcissism. Even more than hubris. And for women, too. Narcissism is the killer.

James Woods

#74. Man has always assumed that his is the highest form of life in the universe. There is, of course, nothing at all with which to sustain this view.

James Thurber

#75. The truth posed a great dilemma for a man who always had to be right, and yet, for all his grandeur, was often wrong.

David Halberstam

#76. I would never disable spell-check. That would be hubris. Autocorrect I could do without.

Mary Norris

#77. As with many tragedies, our story opens in a moment of triumph.

Dan Jones

#78. What matters are those ordinary acts of kindness and of love, not vaulting ambition with its attendant hubris and smugness.

Michael Dirda

#79. Loss of focus is what most worries Charlie and me when we contemplate investing in businesses that in general look outstanding. All too often, we've seen value stagnate in the presence of hubris or of boredom that caused the attention of managers to wander.

Warren Buffett

#80. Each era has the fatal hubris to believe that it has once and for all climbed to the top of the mountain and can see everything as it is, from the highest and most objective vantage point possible.

Eric Metaxas

#81. A part of me, of course, was reminding myself over and over and over again that I should never have tried to lie to the higher angels of the Ephorate. Hubris, the Greeks called that. "A dumbshit move," might be a more contemporary way of putting it.

Tad Williams

#82. There is no "only one" Vietnam experience - there are as many as there are those who went to Vietnam - but this is mine - the combat, the excitement, the discomfort, the fear, the accomplishments, the hubris, the politics, the challenges, and the sex. This is 1968 - MY Vietnam experience.

Joseph E Abodeely

#83. To wish to withstand the Holy Spirit would be the one unforgivable sin.

Karl Barth

#84. When we don't put the brakes on our self-absorption, we have nothing stopping us from total self-destruction. We become the fruits of our actions.

Zeena Schreck

#85. Feelings of superiority always stem from an illusion.

Marty Rubin

#86. My fatal flaw is hubris.
The brown stuff they spread on veggie sandwiches?
No, seaweed brain. That's hummus. Hubris is worse.
What could be worse than hummus?

Rick Riordan

#87. There was one thing unforgivable, like things in the schoolroom so bad that only Mommy could deal with, to set up a rival good to God's.

Evelyn Waugh

#88. This was the hubris of mankind, to rally in the face of overwhelming odds, to thread the needle and climb the mountain and survive the storm. He

Noah Hawley

#89. Greed, apathy, hubris - even loyalty - all demand payment in the end. Storms will always come, and men will always do evil in the shadow of some other word.

Greg Iles

#90. Most visions of extraterrestrial life are actually steeped in human hubris. The fictional extraterrestrials of 'Star Trek' or a hundred other space operas are less alien than many of my neighbors. And funny, the ones running the place are mostly WASPish men.

Nathan Myhrvold

#91. Beware of that demon called 'Changing The World'.

Marty Rubin

#92. It's hard to say where is the bigger hubris, in their convictions or in the arrogance of carrying them to a third decimal point

Mary Roach

#93. There were long stretches of DNA in between genes that didn't seem to be doing very much; some even referred to these as "junk DNA," though a certain amount of hubris was required for anyone to call any part of the genome "junk," given our level of ignorance.

Francis S. Collins

#94. Nothing is more beautiful than to know all.

Athanasius Kircher

#95. MSN became a quagmire, partly because of Microsoft's hubris.

Donald Clark

#96. No egoism is so insufferable as the Christian with regard to his soul.

W. Somerset Maugham

#97. They do not doubt their presence here, these students. They believe they should be here, they have earned it and thay are paying for it. Au fond, they have bought us all. It is the key to America's greatness, this hubris,

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

#98. With competition there is always ego and hubris ... competition gets in the way of work.

Patrick Dempsey

#99. Mis-define the law of brotherly love by giving men a claim on their neighbors and you have destroyed freedom, justified despotism, and assumed that there can be a master mind, in an ordinary human being, as the mind of God.

Frederick Nymeyer

#100. Success usually breeds a degree of hubris.

Moby