Conceit.—Wind puffs up empty bladders; opinion, fools.—Socrates.
Seest thou a man wise in his own conceit? there is more hope of a fool than of him.—Bible.
Nature has sometimes made a fool, but a coxcomb is always of a man's own making.—Addison.
Everything without tells the individual that he is nothing; everything within persuades him that he is everything.—X. Doudan.
Apes look down on men as degenerate specimens of their own race, just as Hollanders regard the German language as a corruption of the Dutch.—Heinrich Heine.
If its colors were but fast colors, self-conceit would be a most comfortable quality. But life is so humbling, mortifying, disappointing to vanity, that a man's great idea of himself gets washed out of him by the time he is forty.—Charles Buxton.
One's self-satisfaction is an untaxed kind of property which it is very unpleasant to find depreciated.—George Eliot.
The pious vanity of man makes him adore his own qualities under the pretense of worshiping those of God.—Bulwer-Lytton.
Confidence.—Confidence imparts a wondrous inspiration to its possessor. It bears him on in security, either to meet no danger, or to find matter of glorious trial.—Milton.
Society is built upon trust, and trust upon confidence of one another's integrity.—South.