#modes

Mrs Forrester ... sat in state, pretending not to know what cakes were sent up, though she knew, and we knew, and she knew that we knew, and we knew that she knew that we knew, she had been busy all the morning making tea-bread and sponge-cakes. ↗

— Elizabeth Gaskell

#cakes #humor #modesty #pretense #tea-parties

I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#atheism #belief #fantasy #god #humility

Intelligence could be more briliant within modesty. ↗

— Toba Beta

#briliant #intelligence #modesty #intelligence

Love, forgiveness, modesty, humility and gratitude are most important virtues in life. ↗

— P. Remes

#gratitude #humility #love #modesty #forgiveness

Literature exists at the same time in the modes of error and truth; it both betrays and obeys its own mode of being. ↗

— Paul de Man

#betrays #both #error #exists #literature

Author describes auto CEO's decisions to drive rather than fly to Washington as "showy penitence". ↗

— Ron Suskind

#education

And, I may add, from what totally unexpected sources come many of those who from the comparatively modest beginning in the chorus rise to the heights of really great achievement in the theatrical profession. ↗

— Florenz Ziegfeld

#add #beginning #chorus #come #comparatively

When a good man lends himself to the advocacy of slavery, he must, at least for a time, feel himself to be any where but at home, amongst his new thoughts, doctrines, and modes of reasoning. ↗

— Gerrit Smith

#advocacy #amongst #any #doctrines #feel

They were learning that New York had another life, too — subterranean, like almost everything that was human in the city — a life of writers meeting in restaurants at lunchtime or in coffee houses after business hours to talk of work just started or magazines unpublished, and even to lay modest plans for the future. Modestly they were beginning to write poems worth the trouble of reading to their friends over coffee cups. Modestly they were rebelling once more. ↗

— Malcolm Cowley

#conversation #future-plans #lost-generation #modest #new-york

Every writer on this planet THINKS he is a great writer (why waste your entire life writing when you believe you are mediocre?) but its deemed socially unacceptable to actually speak out such thoughts. So, modesty is always a public concept and not an inner one. For that reason alone 'modesty' can actually be said to be the product of a large ego, for the ego is primarily concerned with survival and society rewards this dishonesty and tends to punish honesty (see Camus) ↗

— Martinus Hendrikus Benders

#modesty #writers-on-writing #life