Selected ego quotes

1. The jabroni beating, pie eating, trail blazing, eye brow raising, the best in the present, future and past, and if ya'll don't like me you can kiss the people's ass!

2. The most strongly enforced of all known taboos is the taboo against knowing who or what you really are behind the mask of your apparently separate, independent, and isolated ego.

3. Certainly the most diverse, if minor, pastime of literary life is the game of Find the Author.

4. Why aren't you more grateful when I prove how wrong you've been?

5. All I ask of Life is a constant and exaggerated sense of my own importance.

6. I wanted to be the first to win three Oscars, but Miss Hepburn has done it. Actually it hasn't been done. Miss Hepburn only won half an Oscar. If they'd given me half an Oscar I would have thrown it back in their faces. You see, I'm an Aries. I never lose.

7. I was never very interested in boys - and there were plenty of them - vying with one another to see how many famous women they would get into the hay.

8. The Pumpkins love rock-and-roll, we absolutely love it, but we also think it's a flatulent, ego-serving kiddie playground. You can have your cake and eat it too.

9. I add status to any tournament I attend.

10. If we long to believe that the stars rise and set for us, that we are the reason there is a Universe, does science do us a disservice in deflating our conceits?

11. Intellectuals never sound more foolish than when posing as the last civilised man.

12. I can win an argument on any topic, against any opponent. People know this, and steer clear of me at parties. Often, as a sign of their great respect, they don't even invite me.

13. We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.

14. The aim of flattery is to soothe and encourage us by assuring us of the truth of an opinion we have already formed about ourselves.

15. They defend their errors as if they were defending their inheritance.

16. An empty man is full of himself.

17. Some for renown, on scraps of learning dote, And think they grow immortal as they quote.

18. What is the first business of one who practices philosophy? To get rid of self-conceit. For it is impossible for anyone to begin to learn that which he thinks he already knows.

19. There is no doubt that in exchanging a self-centered for a selfless life we gain enormously in self-esteem. The vanity of the selfless, even those who practice utmost humility, is boundless.

20. Self-righteousness is a loud din raised to drown the voice of guilt within us.

21. The compulsion to take ourselves seriously is in inverse proportion to our creative capacity. When the creative flow dries up, all we have left is our importance.

22. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism.

23. Genius goes around the world in its youth incessantly apologizing for having large feet. What wonder that later in life it should be inclined to raise those feet too swiftly to fools and bores.

24. I couldn't regard myself as personally repulsive. No man can, or, if he ever comes to do so, that is the end of him.

25. My specialty is being right when other people are wrong.

26. The worst cliques are those which consist of one man.

27. The highest form of vanity is love of fame.

28. I still lack to a considerable degree that naturally superior kind of manner that I would dearly like to possess.

29. Egocentrics are attracted to the inept. It gives them one more excuse for patting themselves on the back.

30. Though wisdom is common, yet the many live as if they had a wisdom of their own.

31. A charming fellow, and so clever: he models himself on me.

32. Arrogant, pompous, obnoxious, vain, cruel, verbose, a showoff. I have been called all of these. Of course, I am.

33. Writers are idolized not because they love their fellow men, which is never a recommendation and in extreme instances leads to crucifixion, but because their self-love is in tune with current fears and desires, and in giving it expression they are speaking for an inarticulate multitude.

34. When you argue with your inferiors, you convince them of only one thing: they are as clever as you.

35. I'm not hard to get along with.

36. I'm the last guy in the world to feel overlooked by the Academy.

37. Delusions of grandeur make me feel a lot better about myself.

38. Modesty is a vastly overrated virtue.

39. Mir Bahadur Ali is, as we have seen, incapable of evading the most vulgar of art's temptations: that of being a genius.

40. One wonders that there can be found a man courageous enough to occupy the post. It is a matter of meditation. Having given it a few minutes I come to the conclusion in the serenity of my heart and the peace of my conscience that he must be either an extreme megalomaniac or an utterly unconscious being.

41. Feeling important makes one heavy, clumsy and vain. To be a warrior one needs to be light and fluid.

42. I would say that there are certain glittering generalities that can be made about every sign that will hold true about everybody who's a member of that sign. For instance, if you had been a Virgo, you would have understood how I hate to be late. I broke up a group I was in once called The Big Three because one of the guys was chronically late and I couldn't take it. I feel when you're supposed to be some place on time, you're there on time. You don't hang people up. It doesn't matter if you're the President of the United States. That's not what you are here for, to hang people up. When I know somebody's sign, and I usually know everybody's sign whether they tell me or not - after getting into this for several years - it helps me to deal with them. Usually I'd rather let people deal with me. That's a total ego hang up, but that's where it's at.

43. None but a fool is always right.

44. 'Our society is besotted by the cult of the ego: books, television programmes, films, literature, magazines, are awash with stories and dramas about personal relationships: who-loves-whom, who-is-bonking-whom; who-wants-to-bonk-someone-else; who-is-cheating-on-someone; who-is-angry-with-someone-for-something; who-has-more-money and so can afford luxuries and self-indulgence; and so on ad nauseum. Not only no honour and very little loyalty, but certainly no notion of either duty or Destiny'

45. Chances are you feel superior to almost everyone you work with - however, they probably feel the same way about you.

46. People may flatter themselves just as much by thinking that their faults are always present to other people's minds, as if they believe that the world is always contemplating their individual charms and virtues.

47. Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.

48. The supreme empire is that of the Emperor who renounces all normal life, that of other men, and in who the care of supremacy doesn't weigh like a load of jewels.

49. L'amour-propre est le plus grand de tous les flatteurs.

50. Les vieillards aiment a donner de bons preceptes, pour se consoler de n'etre plus en etat de donner de mauvais exemples.

51. Chacun dit du bien de son coeur et personne n'en ose dire de son esprit.

52. Le vrai moyen d'etre trompe, c'est de se croire plus fin que les autres.

53. On parle peu quand la vanite ne fait pas parler.

54. Le refus des louanges est un desir d'etre loue deux fois.

55. Qui vit sans folie n'est pas si sage qu'il croit.

56. Nous aimons toujours ceux qui nous admirent; et nous n'aimons pas toujours ceux que nous admirons.

57. Ce qui fait que les amants et les maitresses ne s'ennuient point d'etre ensemble, c'est qu'ils parlent toujours d'eux-memes.

58. Il y a dans la jalousie plus d'amour-propre que d'amour.

59. Nous ne trouvons guere de gens de bon sens, que ceux qui sont de notre avis.

60. Il n'y a point de gens qui aient plus souvent tort que ceux qui ne peuvent souffrir d'en avoir.

61. Ce qui nous rend la vanite des autres insupportable, c'est qu'elle blesse la notre.

62. Il n'est jamais plus difficile de bien parler que quand on a honte de se taire.

63. Casanova! My dear man, Casanova is not worthy to untie my bootstrings!

64. When you've seen beyond yourself, then you may find, peace of mind is waiting there.

65. The vanity of teaching doth oft tempt a man to forget that he is a blockhead.

66. I don't have a photograph. I'd give you my footprints, but they're upstairs in my socks.

67. To write an autobiography of Groucho Marx would be as asinine as to read an autobiography of Groucho Marx.

68. Years ago, I tried to top everybody, but I don't anymore. I realized it was killing conversation. When you're always trying for a topper you aren't really listening. It ruins communication.

69. Although the Senate is much given to admiring in its members a superiority less obvious or quite invisible to outsiders, one Senator seldom proclaims his own inferiority to another, and still more seldom likes to be told of it.

70. The effect of power and publicity on all men is the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim's sympathies.

71. No man likes to have his intelligence or good faith questioned, especially if he has doubts about it himself.

72. The longer I am out of office, the more infallible I appear to myself.

73. The nice thing about being a celebrity is that when you bore people, they think it's their fault.

74. Jack: I believe in being honest with myself. If there's one thing I hate it's when a comedian is great and won't admit it. I've never met one like that, but if I did, I'd hate them.

75. I can't die. It would wreck my image.

76. In Paris, everybody wants to be an actor; nobody is content to be a spectator.

77. Victor Hugo was a madman who thought he was Victor Hugo.

78. No one in our age was cleverer than Keynes nor made less attempt to conceal it.

79. To mark all that I say in conversation, merely to beget in others, a good opinion of myself, and examine it.

80. The conceited villager believes the entire world to be his village. Provided that be can be mayor, humiliate the rival who stole his sweetheart, or add to the savings in his strongbox , he considers the universal order good, unaware of those giants with seven-league boots who can crush him underfoot, or of the strife in the heavens between comets that go through the air asleep, gulping down worlds.

81. I still think I am the greatest.

82. I am the greatest show on Earth.

83. 'The one thing I fear for [Kanye] the most is if you keep talking about being the greatest, people eventually are going to want to watch you fail.' - John Mayer (From MTV.com)

84. It's a business you go into because you're an egocentric. It's a very embarrassing profession.

85. When small men begin to cast big shadows, it means that the sun is about to set.

86. Nothing is more intolerable than to have to admit to yourself your own errors.

87. A man may be humble through vainglory.

88. There is a plague on Man, the opinion that he knows something.

89. Man is too thoroughly an egoist not to be also an egotist; if he love, the object shall know it. During a lifetime he may conceal it through stress of expediency and honour, but it shall bubble from his dying lips, though it disrupt a neighbourhood. It is known, however, that most men do not wait so long to disclose their passion. In the case of Lorison, his particular ethics positively forbade him to declare his sentiments, but he must needs dally with the subject, and woo by innuendo at least.

90. Conscience makes egotists of us all.

91. I don't at all like knowing what people say of me behind my back. It makes me far too conceited.

92. In every first novel the hero is the author as Christ or Faust.

93. Just a few days ago a man came to see me and he said, 'I am a humble man. I am just like the dust on your feet. I have been trying for almost twenty years to achieve higher consciousness, but I have been a failure. Why can't I attain?' And on and on he went. Every sentence started with I. If the grammar allowed, every sentence would have ended with I. And if everything was allowed, every sentence would have consisted only of I's. 'I etcetera, I etcetera, I etcetera,' it went on and on. You are filled too much. There is no room, no space for God to enter in you. You are too crowded. A thousand I's milling inside - they don't leave any space for anything to enter in you.

94. The whole day was strange, stunning, and it was a shattering experience. The past was disappearing, as if it had never belonged to me, as if I had read about it somewhere, as if I had dreamed about it, as if it was somebody else's story I have heard and somebody told it to me. I was becoming loose from my past, I was being uprooted from my history, I was losing my autobiography. I was becoming a non-being, what Buddha calls anatta. Boundaries were disappearing, distinctions were disappearing.

95. When you are no more, only then for the first time will you be.

96. Only a ripe fruit falls to the ground. Ripeness is all. An unripe ego cannot be thrown, cannot be destroyed. And if you struggle with an unripe ego to destroy and dissolve it, the whole effort is going to be a failure. Rather than destroying it, you will find it more strengthened in new subtle ways. This is something basic to be understood: the ego must come to a peak, it must be strong, it must have attained an integrity - only then can you dissolve it. A weak ego cannot be dissolved.

97. It was one of the dullest speeches I ever heard. The Agee woman told us for three quarters of an hour how she came to write her beastly book, when a simple apology was all that was required.

98. Pavarotti is not vain, but conscious of being unique.

99. (Insanity) is not hubris, not pride; it is inflation of the ego to its ultimate - confusion between him who worships and that which is worshipped. Man has not eaten God; God has eaten man.

100. Volumes might be written upon the follies and imbecilities of great men. A full rounded man - a man of sterling sense and natural logic - is just as rare as a great painter, poet, or sculptor. If you tell your friend that he is not a painter, that he has no genius for poetry, he will probably admit the truth of what you say, without feeling that he has been insulted in the least. But if you tell him that he is not a logician, that he has but little idea of the value of a fact, that he has no real conception of what evidence is, and that he never had an original thought in his life, he will cut your acquaintance.