The vices darken and distort human understanding

 Wrath and malice, envy and revenge, do darken and distort the understandings of men.

 

-- John Tillotson 

 

 

A trinity of vices

 How black and base a vice ingratitude is, may be seen in those vices which it is always in combination with, pride and hardheartedness, or want of compassion.

-- Robert South 

Pride will have a fall

 Pride will have a fall: the beautiful trees go all to the wreck here, and only the misshapen and despicable dwarf is left standing.

 

-- Roger L'Estrange 

When pride cometh . . .

 When pride cometh, then cometh shame: but with the lowly is wisdom.

-- Proverbs 11:2

US Embassy to the Holy See flies fag flag to mark beginning of Abnormal Pride Month and fit in with local fauna

 

The never-failing vice of fools

Of all the causes which conspire to blind

Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,

What the weak head with strongest bias rules

Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.

-- Alexander Pope

No Gates of Vienna for these guys: The Christians wear the cuck label with pride at First Things

And no tea in Boston Harbor nor American victory at Yorktown, either. Catholicism means the death of America from within as surely as Islam means it from without.

Matthew Schmitz, here in "Christianity is for Cucks":

As it happens, I think those alt-right accusations had some truth to them. Christianity really is for cucks . . .. Christianity is not a matter of blood, or of race, or of victory in this world. It requires us to accept defeat in this life so we might enjoy triumph in the next. A Catholic cannot be certain that his line will continue or his country thrive. He only knows that the gates of hell will not prevail against Christ’s Church.

Perfect freedom eludes us

From Carol Zaleski on Samuel Johnson, here, who with fine turns of phrase has captured the humanity and wisdom of the man who navigated the divide between pre-modern and modern man more heroically than any English writer before or since:

'No writer has more convincingly described the failure to “scheme life,” the near futility of hygienic self-improvement. Not piety alone, but piety weathered by illness, disfigurement, financial worries, marital difficulties, overwork, and hereditary melancholy (to the point that he feared madness), as well as his bungled attempts at self-discipline, made Johnson skeptical of the Enlightenment ideal of autonomy. He was a kind and courageous man (notwithstanding his well-known combativeness in debate), full of charity, whose setbacks inoculated him against spiritual pride.'