Creativity Quote by Robert Hunter

Pride, in Robert Hunter's hands, isn’t the triumphant kind that fuels a guitar solo; it’s a moral blackout. “Wickedness” is a blunt choice, old-scripture harsh, and it frames pride not as a harmless ego boost but as a spiritual corrosive that kills your night vision. The line’s real sting is how it turns perception into the battleground: pride doesn’t just make you arrogant, it makes you unable to see the math of your own life.

Hunter sets up a quiet audit of credit and debt. “How little grace is earned and how much given” lands like a rebuke to the American reflex to claim every good outcome as a personal achievement. Grace here isn’t just religious vocabulary; it’s the unbilled labor of other people, the luck you didn’t summon, the second chances you didn’t negotiate for. Pride’s “wickedness” is that it edits the story until you’re the sole author, cutting out the collaborators and the mercy.

As a lyricist best known for writing with and around the Grateful Dead’s long, searching improvisations, Hunter often pulled from folk, gospel, and frontier myth to talk about big moral weather without preaching. This line fits that tradition: spare, portable, and a little haunted. It asks for humility not as self-erasure, but as clarity. When you admit how much is given, you stop mistaking the gift for wages, and gratitude becomes less a virtue signal than a restored ability to see.