One of the most famous sentences in the book.
Quick answer
Pride is a leading indicator: it walks ahead of destruction the way lightning walks ahead of thunder. Not a threat but a sequence, observed so often the sages wrote it down as law-like.
Read both lines
The lines narrow as they go: pride before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall, the footnote reads "stumbling," and the verb matters: pride goes before, travels in front, an advance man announcing what follows. The sages are describing a mechanism. Pride destroys because of what it does to the proud: it closes the ears, empties the room of truth-tellers, and inflates self-assessment past the facts, so that by the time the fall comes, the man has been walking blind among ledges for years. The next verse completes the thought: the low place pride despises is standing-room the fall cannot reach. Scripture's gallery runs from Pharaoh to Haman to Nebuchadnezzar grazing like an ox, and history keeps adding wings.
What it does not mean
The popular misquote "pride goes before the fall" trims the words but not the meaning; nothing there needs stern correcting. The real misuse is retrospective diagnosis: watching someone's collapse and concluding their pride must have caused it. The proverb runs forward, pride tends toward a fall, not backward, every fall proves pride. Job's friends built a theology out of that reversal, and God rebuked them for it. Use the verse as a mirror for yourself, not a verdict over someone else's wreckage.
Related: Proverbs 11:2 · Proverbs 18:12 · Daniel 4:28–37
New King James Version®, Copyright © 1982, Thomas Nelson. All rights reserved. Full copyright information. Scripture provided by API.Bible.
Go Deeper
If this verse has been used to put weight on you that it was never carrying, ask about it directly.