“The mirror in my room in the Windsor Hotel in Paris reflected my favorite image of me- a darkly handsome young airline pilot, smooth-skinned, bull-shouldered, and immaculately groomed.”
“Pausing, he set down his things and began throwing punches to warm himself up. Wow, he hadn’t realized how fast his right had gotten! His left was pretty good too. He was a machine!”
“It is an impressively arrogant move to conclude that just because you don’t like something, it is empirically not good. I don’t like Chinese food, but I don’t write articles trying to prove it doesn’t exist.”
“Frankly, it never occurred to me that I needed someone who looked like me to show me the way. I was ignorant and arrogant and persistent and the writing left me no choice at all.”
“Can you worship a God who isn’t obligated to explain His actions to you? Could it be your arrogance that makes you think God owes you an explanation?”
“I once heard Alan Watts observe that a Chinese child will ask, “How does a baby grow?” But an American child will ask, “How do you make a baby?” From an early age, we absorb our culture’s arrogant conviction that we manufacture everything, reducing the world to mere “raw material” that lacks all value until we impose our designs and labor on it.”
“When you discard arrogance, complexity, and a few other things that get in the way, sooner or later you will discover that simple, childlike, and mysterious secret known to those of the Uncarved Block: Life is Fun.”
“Deceitfulness, and arrogance, and pride,
Quickness to anger, harsh and evil speech,
And ignorance, to its own darkness blind,--
These be the signs, My Prince! of him whose birth
Is fated for the regions of the vile.”
“He, the young man carbuncular arrives,
A small house agent’s clerk, with one bold stare,
One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
“It must, thought he, be true that blood is ultimately thicker than water. He guessed that these two stubborn and arrogant people were both more lonely than he could imagine, and at the bottom of their hearts pleased to find themselves with kith and kin, no matter whom.”
Mr Crofton sat down on a box and looked fixedly at the other bottle on the hob. He was silent for two reasons. The first reason, sufficient in itself, was that he had nothing to say; the second reason was that he considered his companions beneath him. He had been a canvasser for Wilkins, the Conservative, but when the Conservatives had withdrawn their man and, choosing the lesser of two evils, given their support to the Nationalist candidate, he had been engaged to work for Mr Tierney.