Most of them are already so puffed up with their imagined importance that they have no idea how silly they sound.

A man who takes himself too seriously will find that no one else takes him seriously.

A youth is to be regarded with respect. How do we know that his future will not be equal to our present? If he reach the age of forty or fifty, and has not made himself heard of, then indeed he will not be worth being regarded with respect.

What do you believe? I believe that the last and the first suffer equally. Pari passu. Equally? It is not alone in the dark of death that all souls are one soul. Of what would you repent? Nothing. Nothing? One thing. I spoke with bitterness about my life and I said that I would take my own part against the slander of oblivion and against the monstrous facelessness of it and that I would stand a stone in the very void where all would read my name. Of that vanity I recant all.

If you dont like to be laughed at dont fall on your ass, said Rawlins.

I'm tired of self-important mentalities.

But she did not suffer so much, because she despised the triviality of these other people.

Emerson said: "Every man I meet is my superior in some way. In that, I learn of him.

And the pathetic part of it is that frequently those who have the least justification for a feeling of achievement bolster up their egos by a show of tumult and conceit which is truly nauseating. As Shakespeare put it: " … man, proud man, / Drest in a little brief authority, / … Plays such fantastic tricks before high heaven / As make the angels weep.

Make the other person feel important — and do it sincerely.

Nobody in the heavens above or on the earth beneath or in the waters under the earth will ever object to your saying: 'I may be wrong. Let's examine the facts.

He wanted a feeling of importance; and as long as Mr. Parsons argued with him, he got his feeling of importance by loudly asserting his authority. But as soon as his importance was admitted and the argument stopped and he was permitted to expand his ego, he became a sympathetic and kindly human being.