A Quote by David Mitchell

False modesty can be worse than arrogance.

David Mitchell

Quote Topics

Arrogance False False Modesty Modesty Than Worse

Quote Author

David Mitchell
English - Novelist
Born: January 12, 1969

Fidelity to conscience is inconsistent with retiring modesty. If it be so, let the modesty succumb. It can be only a false modesty which can be thus endangered.

Harriet Martineau

There is a false modesty, which is vanity; a false glory, which is levity; a false grandeur, which is meanness; a false virtue, which is hypocrisy, and a false wisdom, which is prudery.

Jean de la Bruyere

It is a common teaching of the Saints that one of the principal means of leading a good and exemplary life is certainly modesty and the mortification of the eyes. Just as there is nothing better than modesty to preserve devotion in a soul and to edify one's neighbor, so too, there is nothing worse than immodesty and licentious glances to expose a person to the danger of becoming lax and loose in morals.

Alphonsus Rodriguez

False modesty is better than none.

Vilhjalmur Stefansson

Modesty and reverence are no less virtues of freemen than the democratic feeling which will submit neither to arrogance nor to servility.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.

One who has an inferiority complex can never be really humble, but can only have false modesty or false humility.

Sri Chinmoy

True humility is more like self-forgetfulness than false modesty.

C. S. Lewis

True modesty avoids everything that is criminal; false modesty everything that is unfashionable.

Joseph Addison

Modesty is only arrogance by stealth.

Terry Pratchett

I'll tell you something about Glenn McGrath - he was a much better bowler than me. This is not false modesty.

James Anderson

I prefer honest arrogance to hypocritical modesty.

Frank Lloyd Wright

I definitely was always expected and encouraged to be a songwriter from a very young age, ... But really it's because, as a child, I thought I was Judy Garland. And when I started out, I was a little nuts. I thought I was a classic, legendary superstar when only 10 people knew who I was. I feel in some ways that my confidence is misinterpreted as arrogance, which is understandable. But I've also always thought that false modesty is evil.

Rufus Wainwright

There are worse things than having behaved foolishly in public. There are worse things than these miniature betrayals, committed or endured or suspected; there are worse things than not being able to sleep for thinking about them. It is 5 a.m. All the worse things come stalking in and stand icily about the bed looking worse and worse and worse.

Fleur Adcock

Nothing is more amiable than true modesty, and nothing more contemptible than the false. The one guards virtue, the other betrays it.

Joseph Addison

Books about spies and traitors - and the congressional hearings that follow the exposure of traitors - generally assume that false-negative errors are much worse than false-positive errors.