Modesty Quotes - page 9
In his heart every man knows quite well that, being unique, he will be in the world only once and that no imaginable chance will for a second time gather together into a unity so strangely variegated an assortment as he is: he knows it but he hides it like a bad conscience-why? From fear of his neighbor, who demands conventionality and cloaks himself with it. But what is it that constrains the individual to fear his neighbor, to think and act like a member of a herd, and to have no joy in himself? Modesty, perhaps, in a few rare cases. With the great majority it is indolence, inertia. ... Men are even lazier than they are timid, and fear most of all the inconveniences with which unconditional honesty and nakedness would burden them. Artists alone hate this sluggish promenading in borrowed fashions and appropriated opinions and they reveal everyone's secret bad conscience, the law that every man is a unique miracle.
Friedrich Nietzsche
Canst thou judge men?... then make us imitators of thyself, as Socrates did. Do this, do not do that, else will I cast thee into prison; this is not governing men like reasonable creatures. Say rather, As God hath ordained, so do; else thou wilt suffer chastisement and loss. Askest thou what loss? None other than this: To have left undone what thou shouldst have done: to have lost the faithfulness, the reverence, the modesty that is in thee! Greater loss than this seek not to find! (91).
Epictetus
That woman is living solely for the cause of India. She is using all her extraordinary power of speech and pen in India's service. There is, of course, in her behaviour with men, a freedom which may appear to the strictly orthodox - Malaviyaji for instance - as going beyond the limits of modesty. She revels in fun and frolic - even mischievous pranks. But to me it seems she is just the sort of person whom all that befits. I know her husband well enough. He, too, is a brave soul. He has the largeness of heart to give her the fullest freedom. They simply hug and dote upon each other. I think she never hides from the public gaze her conduct with anybody. The fact itself is a proof of the purity of her soul.
Sarojini Naidu
Better the absence of greatness than the establishing of a false greatness by assumed humility. Not only do these efforts at humility on man's part not express strength, they are, on the contrary, expressions of modesty born of weakness, which springs from a lack of knowledge of the truth of Reality.
Beware of modesty. Modesty, under the cloak of humility, invariably leads one into the clutches of self-deception. Modesty breeds egoism, and man eventually succumbs to pride through assumed humility.
The greatest greatness and the greatest humility go hand in hand naturally and without effort.
Meher Baba
There is a kind of harmful modesty which ... sometimes affects men of superior character to their detriment by keeping them in a state of mediocrity. I am reminded of the remark that a certain gentleman of acknowledged eminence once made at luncheon to some persons of the Court, "How bitterly I regret the time I wasted merely to learn how superior I am to all of you!”.
Nicolas Chamfort
Those who purge the soul believe that the soul can receive no benefit from any teachings offered to it until someone by cross-questioning reduces him who is cross-questioned to an attitude of modesty, by removing the opinions that obstruct the teachings, and thus purges him and makes him think that he knows only what he knows, and no more.
Plato
