The Devil is not the Prince of Matter; the Devil is the arrogance of the spirit, faith without smile, truth that is never seized by doubt. The Devil is grim because he knows where he is going, and, in moving, he always returns whence he came.
Trouble arises when either science or religion claims universal jurisdiction, when either religious dogma or scientific dogma claims to be infallible. Religious creationists and scientific materialists are equally dogmatic and insensitive. By their arrogance they bring both science and religion into disrepute.
You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named "Bush", "Dick", and "Colin." Need I say more?
Your thought advocates fame and show. Mine counsels me and implores me to cast aside notoriety and treat it like a grain of sand cast upon the shore of eternity. Your thought instills in your heart arrogance and superiority. Mine plants within me love for peace and the desire for independence. Your thought begets dreams of palaces with furniture of sandalwood studded with jewels, and beds made of twisted silk threads. My thought speaks softly in my ears, "Be clean in body and spirit even if you have nowhere to lay your head." Your thought makes you aspire to titles and offices. Mine exhorts me to humble service.
Supple knees feed arrogance.
Zen is not a particular state but the normal state: silent, peaceful, unagitated. In Zazen neither intention, analysis, specific effort nor imagination take place. It's enough just to be without hypocrisy, dogmatism, arrogance — embracing all opposites.
Father, Your Word clearly states that You will punish the world for its evil, the wicked for their sins. You will put an end to the arrogance of the haughty and will humble the pride of the ruthless. (Isa. 13:11)
But I would ask if God demands aught else from him than to know him and to love him, and why, since man is by nature capable of love and knowledge, he believes that God cannot make himself known and loved by him. He certainly knows at least that he is, and that he loves something. Therefore if he see anything in his darkness, and if among the things of earth he find any subject of his love, why, if God impart to him some ray of his essence, should he not be capable of knowing and of loving him in the manner in which it shall please him to communicate himself to us? There must be then an intolerable arrogance in these sort of arguments, though they seem founded on apparent humility, which is neither sincere nor reasonable, unless it makes us confess that not knowing of ourselves what we are, we can learn it from God alone.
With the arrogance of youth, I determined to do no less than to transform the world with Beauty. If I have succeeded in some small way, if only in one small corner of the world, amongst the men and women I love, then I shall count myself blessed, and blessed, and blessed, and the work goes on.
In giants we must kill pride and arrogance; but our greatest foes, and whom we must chiefly combat, are within.
Perhaps no order of mammals presents us with so extraordinary a series of gradations as this*--leading us insensibly from the crown and summit of the animal creation down to creatures, from which there is but a step, as it seems, to the lowest, smallest, and least intelligent of the placental Mammalia. It is as if nature herself had foreseen the arrogance of man, and with Roman severity had provided that his intellect, by its very triumphs, should call into prominence the slaves, admonishing the conqueror that he is but dust.
The difference between patriotism and nationalism is that the patriot is proud of his country for what it does, and the nationalist is proud of his country no matter what it does; the first attitude creates a feeling of responsibility, but the second a feeling of blind arrogance that leads to war.
An extraordinary amount of arrogance is present in any claim of having been the first in "inventing" something. It's an arrogance that some enjoy, and others do not. Now I reach beyond arrogance when I proclaim that fractals had been pictured forever but their true role remained unrecognized and waited for me to be uncovered.
A CODE OF ETHICAL BEHAVIOR FOR PATIENTS: 7. PAY YOUR MEDICAL BILLS PROMPTLY AND WILLINGLY. You should consider it a privilege to contribute, however modestly, to the well-being of physicians and other humanitarians. 8. DO NOT SUFFER FROM AILMENTS THAT YOU CANNOT AFFORD. It is sheer arrogance to contract illnesses that are beyond your means. 9. NEVER REVEAL ANY OF THE SHORTCOMINGS THAT HAVE COME TO LIGHT IN THE COURSE OF TREATMENT BY YOUR DOCTOR. The patient-doctor relationship is a privileged one, and you have a sacred duty to protect him from exposure. 10. NEVER DIE WHILE IN YOUR DOCTOR'S PRESENCE OR UNDER HIS DIRECT CARE. This will only cause him needless inconvenience and embarrassment.
But I find the old notions somehow appealing. Not that I want to go back to them -- it is outrageous to have some outer authority tell you what is proper use and abuse of your own faculties, and it is ludicrous to hold reason higher than body or feeling. Still there is something true and profoundly sane about the belief that acts like murder or theft or assault violate the doer as well as the done to. We might even, if we thought this way, have less crime. The popular view of crime, as far as I can deduce it from the movies and television, is that it is a breaking of a rule by someone who thinks they can get away with that; implicitly, everyone would like to break the rule, but not everyone is arrogant enough to imagine they can get away with it. It therefore becomes very important for the rule upholders to bring such arrogance down. -- Marilyn French, "The Woman's Room"
"From the very beginning--from the first moment, I may almost say--of my acquaintance with you, your manners, impressing me with the fullest belief of your arrogance, your conceit, and your selfish disdain of the feelings of others, were such as to form the groundwork of disapprobation on which succeeding events have built so immovable a dislike; and I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed on to marry."
"Sir," said Villefort, in the squeaky tone assumed by magistrates in their oratorical periods, and of which they cannot, or will not, divest themselves in society, "sir, the signal service which you yesterday rendered to my wife and son has made it a duty for me to offer you my thanks. I have come, therefore, to discharge this duty, and to express to you my overwhelming gratitude." And as he said this, the "eye severe" of the magistrate had lost nothing of its habitual arrogance. He spoke in a voice of the procureur-general, with the rigid inflexibility of neck and shoulders which caused his flatterers to say (as we have before observed) that he was the living statue of the law.
Nymphs of the fountains, progeny of Jove! If e'er Ulysses on your altar burn'd The thighs of fatted lambs or kidlings, grant This my request. O let the Hero soon, Conducted by some Deity, return! So shall he quell that arrogance which safe Thou now indulgest, roaming day by day The city, while bad shepherds mar the flocks.
But, it was only the pleasanter to turn to Biddy and to Joe, whose great forbearance shone more brightly than before, if that could be, contrasted with this brazen pretender. I went towards them slowly, for my limbs were weak, but with a sense of increasing relief as I drew nearer to them, and a sense of leaving arrogance and untruthfulness further and further behind.
Daughter of Jove, why comest thou? that thyself May'st witness these affronts which I endure From Agamemnon? Surely as I speak, This moment, for his arrogance, he dies.
Nevertheless, there was always a great deal of mystery about these leaders, and no certain fact can invalidate the singular arrogance of this reply made later on by a man accused before the Court of Peers:--
"Mama dislikes being disturbed in an evening," remarked Eliza. I soon rose, quietly took off my bonnet and gloves, uninvited, and said I would just step out to Bessie--who was, I dared say, in the kitchen--and ask her to ascertain whether Mrs. Reed was disposed to receive me or not to- night. I went, and having found Bessie and despatched her on my errand, I proceeded to take further measures. It had heretofore been my habit always to shrink from arrogance: received as I had been to-day, I should, a year ago, have resolved to quit Gateshead the very next morning; now, it was disclosed to me all at once that that would be a foolish plan. I had taken a journey of a hundred miles to see my aunt, and I must stay with her till she was better--or dead: as to her daughters' pride or folly, I must put it on one side, make myself independent of it. So I addressed the housekeeper; asked her to show me a room, told her I should probably be a visitor here for a week or two, had my trunk conveyed to my chamber, and followed it thither myself: I met Bessie on the landing.
8:13. The fear of the Lord hateth evil; I hate arrogance, and pride, and every wicked way, and a mouth with a double tongue.
It was the answer which Hobbes (1588-1679) gave to these fundamental questions that supplied the starting-point for independent ethical philosophy in England. The nature of this answer was determined by the psychological views to which Hobbes had been led, possibly to some extent under the influence of Bacon,[26] partly perhaps through association with his younger contemporary Gassendi, who, in two treatises, published between the appearance of Hobbes's _De cive_ (1642) and that of the _Leviathan_ (1651), endeavoured to revive interest in Epicurus. Hobbes's psychology is in the first place materialistic; he holds, that is, that in any of the psycho-physical phenomena of human nature the reality is a material process of which the mental feeling is a mere "appearance." Accordingly he regards pleasure as essentially motion "helping vital action," and pain as motion "hindering" it. There is no logical connexion between this theory and the doctrine that appetite of desire has always pleasure (or the absence of pain) for its object; but a materialist, framing a system of psychology, will naturally direct his attention to the impulses arising out of bodily wants, whose obvious end is the preservation of the agent's organism; and this, together with a philosophic wish to simplify, may lead him to the conclusion that all human impulses are similarly self-regarding. This, at any rate, is Hobbes's cardinal doctrine in moral psychology, that each man's appetites or desires are naturally directed either to the preservation of his life, or to that heightening of it which he feels as pleasure.[27] Hobbes does not distinguish instinctive from deliberate pleasure-seeking; and he confidently resolves the most apparently unselfish emotions into phases of self-regard. Pity he finds to be grief for the calamity of others, arising from imagination of the like calamity befalling oneself; what we admire with seeming disinterestedness as beautiful (_pulchrum_) is really "pleasure in promise"; when men are not immediately seeking present pleasure, they desire power as a means to future pleasure, and thus have a derivative delight in the exercise of power that prompts to what we call benevolent action. Since, then, all the voluntary actions of men tend to their own preservation or pleasure, it cannot be reasonable to aim at anything else; in fact, nature rather than reason fixes this as the end of human action; it is reason's function to show the means. Hence if we ask why it is reasonable for any individual to observe the rules of social behaviour that are commonly called moral, the answer is obvious that this is only indirectly reasonable, as a means to his own preservation or pleasure. It is not, however, in this, which is only the old Cyrenaic or Epicurean answer, that the distinctive point of Hobbism lies. It is rather in the doctrine that even this indirect reasonableness of the most fundamental moral rules is entirely conditional on their general observance, which cannot be secured apart from government. For example, it is not reasonable for me to perform my share of a contract, unless I have reason for believing that the other party will perform his; and this I cannot have, except in a society in which he will be punished for non-performance. Thus the ordinary rules of social behaviour are only hypothetically obligatory; they are actualized by the establishment of a "common power" that may "use the strength and means of all" to enforce on all the observance of rules tending to the common benefit. On the other hand Hobbes yields to no one in maintaining the paramount importance of moral regulations. The precepts of good faith, equity, requital of benefits, forgiveness of wrong so far as security allows, the prohibition of contumely, pride, arrogance,--which may all be summed up in the formula, "Do not that to another which thou wouldest not have done to thyself" (i.e. the negative of the "golden rule")--he still calls "immutable and eternal laws of nature"--meaning that, though a man is not unconditionally bound to realize them, he is, as a reasonable being, bound to desire that they should be realized. The pre-social state of man, in his view, is also pre-moral; but it is therefore utterly miserable. It is a state in which every one has a right to everything that may conduce to his preservation;[28] but it is therefore also a state of war--a state so wretched that it is the first dictate of rational self-love to emerge from it into social peace and order. Hence Hobbes's ideal constitution naturally comes to be an unquestioned and unlimited--though not necessarily monarchical--despotism. Whatever the government declares to be just or unjust must be accepted as such, since to dispute its dictates would be the first step towards anarchy, the one paramount peril outweighing all particular defects in legislation and administration. It is perhaps easy to understand how, in the crisis of 1640, when the ethico-political system of Hobbes first took written shape, a peace-loving philosopher should regard the claims of individual conscience as essentially anarchical, and dangerous to social well-being; but however strong might be men's yearning for order, a view of social duty, in which the only fixed positions were selfishness everywhere and unlimited power somewhere, could not but appear offensively paradoxical. Entry: C
MATILDA (1102-1164), queen of England and empress, daughter of Henry I. of England, by Matilda, his first wife, was born in 1102. In 1109 she was betrothed to the emperor-elect, Henry V., and was sent to Germany, but the marriage was delayed till 1114. Her husband died after eleven years of wedlock, leaving her childless; and, since both her brothers were now dead, she was recalled to her father's court in order that she might be recognized as his successor in England and Normandy. The Great Council of England did homage to her under considerable pressure. Their reluctance to acknowledge a female sovereign was increased when Henry gave her in marriage to Geoffrey Plantagenet, the heir of Anjou and Maine (1129); nor was it removed by the birth of the future Henry II. in 1133. On the old king's death both England and Normandy accepted his nephew, Stephen, of Mortain and Boulogne. Matilda and her husband were in Anjou at the time. They wasted the next few years in the attempt to win Normandy; but Earl Robert of Gloucester, the half-brother of the empress, at length induced her to visit England and raise her standard in the western shires, where his influence was supreme. Though on her first landing Matilda only escaped capture through the misplaced chivalry of her opponent, she soon turned the tables upon him with the help of the Church and the barons of the west. Stephen was defeated and captured at Lincoln (1141); the empress was acclaimed lady or queen of England (she used both titles indifferently) and crowned at London. But the arrogance which she displayed in her prosperity alienated the Londoners and the papal legate, Bishop Henry of Winchester. Routed at the siege of Winchester, she was compelled to release Stephen in exchange for Earl Robert, and thenceforward her cause steadily declined in England. In 1148, having lost by the earl's death her principal supporter, she retired to Normandy, of which her husband had in the meantime gained possession. Henceforward she remained in the background, leaving her eldest son Henry to pursue the struggle with Stephen. She outlived Henry's coronation by ten years; her husband had died in 1151. As queen-mother she played the part of a mediator between her sons and political parties. Age mellowed her temper, and she turned more and more from secular ambitions to charity and religious works. She died on the 30th of January 1164. Entry: MATILDA
The organization must have been strong in numbers, but only those who were seized for heresy are known by name, and it is only from the indictments of their accusers that their opinions can be gathered. The preachers were picturesque figures in long russet dress down to the heels, who, staff in hand, preached in the mother tongue to the people in churches and graveyards, in squares, streets and houses, in gardens and pleasure grounds, and then talked privately with those who had been impressed. The Lollard literature was very widely circulated--books by Wycliffe and Hereford and tracts and broadsides--in spite of many edicts proscribing it. In 1395 the Lollards grew so strong that they petitioned parliament through Sir Thomas Latimer and Sir R. Stury to reform the church on Lollardist methods. It is said that the Lollard Conclusions printed by Canon Shirley (p. 360) contain the substance of this petition. If so, parliament was told that temporal possessions ruin the church and drive out the Christian graces of faith, hope and charity; that the priesthood of the church in communion with Rome was not the priesthood Christ gave to his apostles; that the monk's vow of celibacy had for its consequence unnatural lust, and should not be imposed; that transubstantiation was a feigned miracle, and led people to idolatry; that prayers made over wine, bread, water, oil, salt, wax, incense, altars of stone, church walls, vestments, mitres, crosses, staves, were magical and should not be allowed; that kings should possess the _jus episcopale_, and bring good government into the church; that no special prayers should be made for the dead; that auricular confession made to the clergy, and declared to be necessary for salvation, was the root of clerical arrogance and the cause of indulgences and other abuses in pardoning sin; that all wars were against the principles of the New Testament, and were but murdering and plundering the poor to win glory for kings; that the vows of chastity laid upon nuns led to child murder; that many of the trades practised in the commonwealth, such as those of goldsmiths and armourers, were unnecessary and led to luxury and waste. These Conclusions really contain the sum of Wycliffite teaching; and, if we add that the principal duty of priests is to preach, and that the worship of images, the going on pilgrimages and the use of gold and silver chalices in divine service are sinful (_The Peasants' Rising and the Lollards_, p. 47), they include almost all the heresies charged in the indictments against individual Lollards down to the middle of the 15th century. The king, who had hitherto seemed anxious to repress the action of the clergy against the Lollards, spoke strongly against the petition and its promoters, and Lollardy never again had the power in England which it wielded up to this year. Entry: LOLLARDS
Should it, however, be sought to express in one word the greatest debt of the drama to Shakespeare, this word must be the same as that which expresses his supreme gift as a dramatist. It is in _characterization_--in the drawing of characters ranging through almost every type of humanity which furnishes a fit subject for the tragic or the comic art--that he remains absolutely unapproached; and it was in this direction that he pointed the way which the English drama could not henceforth desert without becoming untrue to itself. It may have been a mere error of judgment which afterwards held him to have been surpassed by others in particular fields of characterization (setting him down, forsooth, as supremely excellent in male, but not in female, characters). But it was a sure sign of decay when English writers began to shrink from following him in the endeavour to make the drama a mirror of humanity, and when, in self-condemned arrogance, they thrust unreality back upon a stage which he had animated with the warm breath of life, where Juliet had blossomed like a flower of spring, and where Othello's noble nature had suffered and sinned. Entry: P
As regards the English oath, usually "By Jingo," or "By the living Jingo," the derivation is doubtful. The identification with the name of Gingulph or Gengulphus, a Burgundian saint who was martyred on the 11th of May 760, was a joke on the part of R. H. Barham, author of the _Ingoldsby Legends_. Some explain the word as a corruption of Jainko, the Basque name for God. It has also been derived from the Persia _jang_ (war), St Jingo being the equivalent of the Latin god of war, Mars; and is even explained as a corruption of "Jesus, Son of God," Je-n-go. In support of the Basque derivation it is alleged that the oath was first common in Wales, to aid in the conquest of which Edward I. imported a number of Basque mercenaries. The phrase does not, however, appear in literature before the 17th century, first as conjurer's jargon. Motteux, in his "Rabelais," is the first to use "by jingo," translating _par dieu_. The political use of the word as indicating an aggressive patriotism (Jingoes and Jingoism) originated in 1877 during the weeks of national excitement preluding the despatch of the British Mediterranean squadron to Gallipoli, thus frustrating Russian designs on Constantinople. While the public were on the tiptoe of expectation as to what policy the government would pursue, a bellicose music-hall song with the refrain "We don't want to fight, but by Jingo if we do," &c., was produced in London by a singer known as "the great MacDermott," and instantly became very popular. Thus the war-party came to be called Jingoes, and Jingoism has ever since been the term applied to those who advocate a national policy of arrogance and pugnacity. Entry: JINGO
In 1295 a signory favourable to the _grandi_ enacted a law attenuating the _Ordinamenti_, but now the _grandi_ split into two factions, one headed by the Donati, which hoped to abolish the _Ordinamenti_, and the other by the Cerchi, which had given up all hope of their abolition; afterwards these parties came to be called _Neri_ (Blacks) and _Bianchi_ (Whites). A plot of the Donati to establish their influence over Florence with the help of Boniface VIII. having been discovered (May 1300), serious riots broke out between the Neri and the Bianchi. The pope's attempt to unite the _grandi_ having failed, he summoned Charles of Valois to come to his assistance, promising him the imperial crown; in 1301 Charles entered Italy, and was created by the pope _paciaro_ or peacemaker of Tuscany, with instructions to crush the Bianchi and the _popolo_ and exalt the Neri. On the 1st of November Charles reached Florence, promising to respect its laws; but he permitted Corso Donati and his friends to attack the Bianchi, and the new _podestà_, Cante dei Gabrielli of Gubbio, who had come with Charles, punished many of that faction; among those whom he exiled was the poet Dante (1302). Corso Donati, who for some time was the most powerful man in Florence, made himself many enemies by his arrogance, and was obliged to rely on the _popolo grasso_, the irritation against him resulting in a rising in which he was killed (1308). In this same year Henry of Luxemburg was elected king of the Romans and with the pope's favour he came to Italy in 1310; the Florentine exiles and all the Ghibellines of Italy regarded him as a saviour and regenerator of the country, while the Guelphs of Florence on the contrary opposed both him and the pope as dangerous to their own liberties and accepted the protection of King Robert of Naples, disregarding Henry's summons to submission. In 1312 Henry was crowned emperor as Henry VII. in Rome, but instead of the universal ruler and pacifier which he tried to be, he was forced by circumstances into being merely a German kaiser who tried to subjugate free Italian communes. He besieged Florence without success, and died of disease in 1313. Entry: HISTORY