Humans all experience pride in their life, both in the negative and the positive sense. Pride can mean being proud of your work; positive, or having an inordinately high opinion of yourself; negative. While Andrey in “The Black Monk” and Father Gonzaga demonstrate a negative sense of pride, Rilke recommends a positive sense of pride in one's own work. Each of these people feels pride, but for some it is a pride in accomplishment while for others it is a sense of aloofness. Andrey Kovrin in “The Black Monk” feels an inordinate sense of pride for his accomplishments. Andrey's ego is so large that he is borderline megalomaniac and his hubris reaches a point where it is causing him to hallucinate. As a result of this, he is put on a special diet to 'cure' him of his illusions. Kovrin says of this; “Why have you cured me?... All this will reduce me at last to idiocy... I saw hallucinations, but what harm did that do to anyone?” (Chekhov, 14) Andrey is so wrapped up in his pride that he refuses to accept that he is mentally ill. His ego is damaging because it blinds him from recognizing his mental condition. Although not in such an extreme, all people experience pride. One damaging effect of excessive pride is the refusal to accept help. Although Andrey accepted help from his wife and father, many people refuse this aid which can cause disastrous effects. While there is always the stereotypical example of men refusing to ask directions, both sexes are guilty of refusing medical
“There are two kinds of pride, both good and bad. 'Good pride' represents our dignity and self-respect. “'Bad pride' is the deadly sin of superiority that reeks of conceit and arrogance”
Pride, which becomes a major life lesson that is being taught throughout this book, concludes that pride it self is a life changing characteristic that one may chose to attain. In attaining pride one may seem arrogant or stubborn or one may chose to toss the pride aspect of life aside, yet seem somewhat less respectable. This book entails that pride should be taken into serious consideration since it has a major impact in everyday
Pride is a feeling or deep pleasure or satisfaction derived from one's own achievements, the achievements of those with whom one is closely associated, or from qualities or possessions that are widely admired. However, for James Horst, author of the Scarlet Ibis, he focused on this subject through point of view, symbolism, and conflict.
Pride generally means the pleasure or a feeling of deep satisfaction that we get because of our achievements or our skills or some kind of rare quality that we possess. Often times, having pride is considered unhealthy for an individual as it is believed that having pride can lead to internal blindness and finally downfall. This is evitable from “The Tragedy of Macbeth”, by William Shakespeare. Although, we can’t neglect a fact that everything has two sides, a bad one and a good one, just like a two sided coin.
In the short story, “The Scarlet Ibis,” the author, James Hurst, uses the words, “a wonderful, terrible thing” to describe pride. The narrator learns that while pride motivates people to move past their limitations to do fascinating things, pride can also lead them to do horrible actions, or worse. Pride is a positive emotion that humans feel when they achieve a goal or accomplish a difficult task, or in other words, pride represents one’s dignity.
Pride can be describe as a very common thing that one individual has encountered once in their lifetime. Pride can be both positive and negative in one’s perspective. In the stories,“The Odyssey” by Homer and translated by Robert Fitzgerald, “The Necklace,” by Guy De Maupassant, and “The Cask of Amontillado,” by Edgar Allan Poe, the protagonist and several characters exhibit pride. Pride can convey negative effects in one’s life if one individual exaggerates or abuses pride.
Pride is to be confident in yourself to be proud of a skill or quality. In this novel I
Pride is a very common attribute in people that compare to different degrees. Some people have a large ego (a lot of pride and confidence) or a small ego. A dictionary defines “pride” as a feeling of self-respect and personal worth. This topic of pride is shown in certain characters that are in Arthur Miller’s play The Crucible. Characters such as John Proctor, Elizabeth Proctor, and Reverend Hale show their pride- John Proctor has his pride to overlook reality and truth, Elizabeth has her pride so as she doesn’t want to forgive her husband for committing adultery, and Reverend Hale uses his pride as he can detect people guilty of practicing witchcraft. These three characters show in the plat that too much pride can and will lead to a person’s demise in the very future without finding a way to control your pride.
This book was written by Richard Marius 1999 and published by the Belknap press of the Harvard University Press.
Pride becomes unacceptable when it is used to cover up the true feelings inside you, or when it is used to boast or flaunt your capabilities to others. In the story “The Scarlet Ibis” James Hurst wrote, “They did not know that I did it for myself; that pride, whose slave I was, spoke to me louder that all their voices; and that Doodle walked only because I was ashamed of having a crippled brother” (Hurst, 3). The narrator describes himself as ashamed of himself for only really helping himself and not his brother. This is a prime example of how pride can drown you in your own self satisfaction, where all you are worried about is your image and how
Pride whether in oneself due to looks or some type of accomplishment can be pushed to the limits by a person. Regardless if the pride is warranted, studies conducted on a small group people showed an increased amount of influence to the person decision make process. This study also pointed out; regardless of the source of pride an individual’s “pride can impair self-regulation.”(Salerno, Larna and Janiszewski) I believe the findings of this report to be true, because of the results in the stories out comes.
Pride is no less a problem in contemporary society than it was for the ancients. In particular, it is no less a problem for lawyers, who can oftentimes be put in positions of power and be rewarded with large sums of money. Recently, one Houston-based lawyer had a struggle with pride. He lost and with devastating result. This Houston-based lawyer had scored success after success in the courtroom, garnering a large cliental with ever larger
A possible definition of pride is a deep satisfaction of one’s achievements, possessions, or looks. This five-letter word may seem insignificant, but is very hard to control once it gets out of hand. In The Odyssey, by Homer, the main character, Odysseus, must find his way home with his 720 men after the Trojan War. Sadly, his pride causes all his men to die and for his trip to take much longer than it should have. In “The Necklace”, by Guy de Maupassant, the main character, Mathilde, wishes that she was born into a rich family so that she could enjoy a wealthy life. When she has the opportunity to go to a ball, she loses a borrowed and expensive necklace and must find a way to replace it, working a hard life that she thought was beneath her. When Odysseus lets pride control some of his decisions, the gods become angry and punish him with trials until he changes his ways. Similarly, after spending plenty of money to be the most beautiful woman at a ball, Mathilde is forced to give up any chance of going to another ball and must learn to be proud of her work and not her looks. In both The Odyssey and “The Necklace”, pride can cause suffering, but it can also make one a better person in the end.
This chapter is useful because it provides a lot of psychological information about how self-centeredness comes from pride. This proves that pride is “building your happiness around your accomplishments, using your work as the measure of your worth;” and “one key paradox of pride is that it often combines extreme self-confidence with extreme anxiety.” This means that pride is formed by self-sufficiency and ego, but it makes a person more sensitive and unstable. By taking accomplishments as pride, the proud person establishes “self-worth,” but this makes him “utterly dependent on the gossipy and unstable crowd for his own identity.” This chapter also helps me to realize that pride is “unstable” because the proud man’s ego is intentionally treated with less respect than he thinks it deserves. Because of that, it leaves him emotionally vulnerable. Brooks writes that “the self-cultivator spends more energy trying to display the fact that he is happy than he does actually being happy,” meaning that he either realizes that he is unhappy or deceives himself with illusions that he is happy. If he deceives himself, when things come with accomplishments in business and relationship, he will believe that he is superior because “this feeling of superiority will eventually bring him
These symptoms continued during the summer for a couple of months, until Tanya and her father started noticing Andrei talking to himself, changes in his behaviour and appearance, and decided to look for help and take him to the doctor. Andrei was diagnosed with megalomania – a delusional mental disorder, characterised by feelings of great personal power and importance. Potassium bromide was used as a treatment for Kovrin’s illness and has helped - Andrei recovered: worked less, gained some weight, did not consume any alcohol and, most importantly, both auditory and visual hallucinations stopped occurring. However, this also led to Andrei becoming more agitated, easily irritated and ironic. There are some indications that his appearance has changed as well, implying the loss of self-care and neglect or impairments in personal hygiene. Andrei was still delusional, exalting himself ‘how fortunate Buddha, Mohammed, and Shakespeare were that their kind relations and doctors did not cure them of their ecstasy and their inspiration’ (‘The Black Monk’, Chapter VIII). Andrei Kovrin’s life collapsed as a result of the treatment – his marriage fell apart and his academic career was ruined by his illness –