cutting off one's nose to spite one's face

Verb

cut off one's nose to spite one's face (third-person singular simple present cuts off one's nose to spite one's face, present participle cutting off one's nose to spite one's face, simple past and past participle cut off one's nose to spite one's face)

1. (idiomatic) To harm oneself as a result of attempting to harm an adversary.
   • The public disgrace of his arrival - which I sometimes wonder he could manage to survive - rankled in his bones; he was in that humour when a man - in the words of the old adage - will cut off his nose to spite his face; and he must make himself a public spectacle in the hopes that some of the...1889, Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae