A Quote by Joseph Addison

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkwardness.

Joseph Addison

Quote Topics

Awkwardness Bashfulness Mere Merit Without

Quote Author

Joseph Addison
English - Writer
May 1, 1672 - June 17, 1719

Mere bashfulness without merit is awkward; and merit without modesty, insolent. But modest merit has a double claim to acceptance, and generally meets with as many patrons as beholders.

Joseph Addison

There are two distinct sorts of what we call bashfulness; this, the awkwardness of a booby, which a few steps into the world will convert into the pertness of a coxcomb; that, a consciousness, which the most delicate feelings produce, and the most extensive knowledge cannot always remove.

Henry Mackenzie

Bashfulness is more frequently connected with good sense than we find assurance; and impudence, on the other hand, is often the mere effect of downright stupidity.

William Shenstone

It is possible to indulge too great contempt for mere success, which is frequently attended with all the practical advantages of merit itself, and with several advantages that merit alone can never command.

William Benton Clulow

There are two principles inherent in the very nature of things, recurring in some particular embodiments whatever field we explore - the spirit of change, and the spirit of conservation. There can be nothing real without both. Mere change without conservation is a passage from nothing to nothing. . . . Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. For after all, there is a flux of circumstance, and the freshness of being evaporates under mere repetition.

Alfred North Whitehead

I feel like I'm constantly trying to avoid awkwardness. I always try to pretend that the awkwardness doesn't exist, and then it just becomes more awkward.

Julia Stiles

No work is of such merit as to instruct from a mere cursory perusal.

Seneca the Younger

The finest manners in the world are awkwardness and fatuity when contrasted with a finer intelligence. They appear but as the fashions of past days,--mere courtliness, knee-buckles and small- clothes, out of date.

Henry David Thoreau

No cause more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of our own importance. He that imagines an assembly filled with his merit, panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains his imagination in pursuit of something that may vindicate the veracity of fame, and show that his reputation was not gained by chance.

Samuel Johnson

Depeche Mode have never got over their teenage awkwardness with each other. We're still like that. Mates but not mates. That awkwardness is there, only now we have families and kids.

Dave Gahan

It may be a mere patriotic bias, though I do not think so, but it seems to me that the English aristocracy is not only the type, but is the crown and flower of all actual aristocracies; it has all the oligarchical virtues as well as all the defects. It is casual, it is kind, it is courageous in obvious matters; but it has one great merit that overlaps even these. The great and very obvious merit of the English aristocracy is that nobody could possibly take it seriously.

Gilbert K. Chesterton

If merit is not recognised, still it is merit, and it ought to be honoured as such; but if it is rewarded, it becomes valuable in the eyes of all, and everybody is encouraged to pursue that course in which merit obtains its due reward.

Keshub Chandra Sen

Since I have difficulty defining merit and what merit alone means - and in any context, whether it's judicial or otherwise - I accept that different experiences in and of itself, bring merit to the system.