The Note-Books of Samuel Butler

The essence of priggishness is setting up to be better than one’s neighbour.  Better may mean more virtuous, more clever, more agreeable or what not.  The worst of it is that one cannot do anything outside eating one’s dinner or taking a walk without setting up to know more than one’s neighbours.  It was this that made me say in Life and Habit [close of ch. ii.] that I was among the damned in that I wrote at all.  So I am; and I am often very sorry that I was never able to reach those more saintly classes who do not set up as instructors of other people.  But one must take one’s lot.