Pride

Pride is defined by the Merriam-Webster dictionary as "reasonable self-esteem" or "confidence and satisfaction in oneself". The Oxford dictionary defines it as "the quality of having an excessively high opinion of oneself or one's own importance." Pride may be related to one's own abilities or achievements, positive characteristics of friends or family, or one's country. Richard Taylor defined pride as "the justified love of oneself," as opposed to false pride or narcissism. Similarly, St. Augustine defined it as "the love of one's own excellence", and Meher Baba called it "the specific feeling through which egoism manifests."

Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion that requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions (e.g. that pride is distinct from happiness and joy) through language-based interaction with others. Some social psychologists identify the nonverbal expression of pride as a means of sending a functional, automatically perceived signal of high social status.

Pride may be considered the opposite of shame or of humility, sometimes as proper or as a virtue and sometimes as corrupt or as a vice. With a positive connotation, ''pride'' refers to a content sense of attachment toward one's own or another's choices and actions, or toward a whole group of people and is a product of praise, independent self-reflection and a fulfilled feeling of belonging. Other possible objects of pride are one's ethnicity and one's sex identity (for example, LGBT pride). With a negative connotation, ''pride'' refers to a foolishly and irrationally corrupt sense of one's personal value, status, or accomplishments used synonymously with hubris.

While some philosophers such as Aristotle (and George Bernard Shaw) consider pride (but not hubris) a profound virtue, some world religions consider pride's fraudulent form a sin, seen in Proverbs of the Hebrew Bible. In Judaism, pride is called the root of all evil. When viewed as a virtue, pride in one's abilities is known as virtuous pride, greatness of soul, or magnanimity, but when viewed as a vice, it is often known to be self-idolatry, sadistic contempt, vanity or vainglory. Provided by Wikipedia