Pride had served to console him in sorrow, and therefore it was a friend; it had supported him when disgusted with fraud, or in resistance to violence, and therefore it was a champion and a fortress.

It was a pride of a peculiar sort: it attached itself to no one point in especial,--not to talent, knowledge, mental gifts, still less to the vulgar commonplaces of birth and fortune; it rather resulted from a supreme and wholesale contempt of all other men, and all their objects,--of ambition, of glory, of the hard business of life.

His favourite virtue was fortitude; it was on this that he now mainly valued himself.

He was proud of his struggles against others, prouder still of conquests over his own passions.

He looked upon FATE as the arch enemy against whose attacks we should ever prepare.
He fancied that against fate he had thoroughly schooled himself.