Tolstoy on the Parade of Human Vanities

Count Tolstoy, portrain by Ilya Efimovich Repin from 1887

A Frenchman is self-assured because he regards himself personally, both in mind and body, as irresistibly attractive to men and women. An Englishman is self-assured, as being a citizen of the best-organized state in the world, and therefore as an Englishman always knows what he should do and knows that all he does as an Englishman is undoubtedly correct. An Italian is self-assured because he is excitable and easily forgets himself and other people. A Russian is self-assured just because he knows nothing and does not want to know anything, since he does not believe that anything can be known. The German’s self-assurance is worst of all, stronger and more repulsive than any other, because he imagines that he knows the truth–science–which he himself has invented but which is for him the absolute truth.

–Count Lëv Nikolaevich Tolstoy, Война и миръ, bk. ix, ch. 10 (1869)