Modest Quotes - Page 23

• I'm against Capitol Punishment in all forms, and I have written many pamphlets on this subject in the manner of Swift's Modest Proposal pamphlet incorporated into Naked Lunch; these pamphlets have marked Naked Lunch as an obscene book.

  William S. Burroughs

  Book, Lunch, Punishment

  Source: realitystudio.org

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• I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few, that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.

  M. F. K. Fisher

  Food, Thinking, Hands

  M. F. K. Fisher, Joan Reardon (2004). “The Art of Eating”, p.402, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Sin aims always at the utmost; every time it rises up to tempt or entice, if it has its own way it will go out to the utmost sin in that kind. Every unclean thought or glance would be adultery if it could, every thought of unbelief would be atheism if allowed to develop. Every rise of lust, if it has its way reaches the height of villainy; it is like the grave that is never satisfied. The deceitfulness of sin is seen in that it is modest in its first proposals but when it prevails it hardens men’s hearts, and brings them to ruin.

  John Owen

  Heart, Men, Lust

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• For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with vile envy, a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences and merits from those who have none? For
  whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Mean, Humility, Men

  Arthur Schopenhauer (2012). “The World as Will and Representation”, p.234, Courier Corporation

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• Fear pounds on the door to our heart demanding to be let in. Joy is modest and often comes into our lives like a shy person entering a room; it can take a while to even notice it's there.

  Jonathan Carroll

  Fear, Heart, Doors

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• I think the environmental impact of this disaster is likely to have been very, very modest.

  Tony Hayward

  Thinking, Impact, Environmental

  "The spilling fields". "Background Briefing" with Wendy Carlisle, www.abc.net.au. July 4, 2010.

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• I quickly convinced myself that the true key to material happiness lay in a modest standard of living which could be achieved with little difficulty under almost all economic conditions.

  Benjamin Graham

  Keys, Littles, Economic

  Benjamin Graham (1996). “Benjamin Graham, the Memoirs of the Dean of Wall Street”, McGraw-Hill Companies

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• It is hard to be modest at times like these so I won't even try...you are all shite!

  Noel Gallagher

  Times Like These, Trying, Hard

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• Yet it ought to be clear that a minimum wage law is, at best, a limited weapon for combatting the evil of low wages, and that the possible good to be achieved by such a law can exceed the possible harm only in proportion as its aims are mode.

  Henry Hazlitt

  Law, Numbers, Evil

  "Economics in One Lesson: The Shortest and Surest Way to Understand Basic Economics".

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• There was the time I bought three cars in the span of three or four weeks. It was crazy; it wasn't greedy. It was mine, my girl's, my mom's. I got Benzes for my ladies. But I felt crazy. You have to understand I come from a world where we're very modest. But that's not greedy. That's nice, right?

  J. Cole

  Girl, Mom, Crazy

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• Now that we are rid of this syndrome of imposing the communist model on people, now that we've given them the chance to get rid of this dogma, I have to tell you Americans that you've been pushing your American way of life for decades. You thought it was perfection itself, the ultimate achievement of human thought... There has to be a different approach... Americans have to be more modest in their desires. We have to stimulate human qualities in people rather than greed.

  Mikhail Gorbachev

  Perfection, People, Greed

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• If I want to free myself from endless cycles of struggling with temptation, I need to keep rediscovering that the pain of the struggle is greater than the pain of the desire. If I develop the habit of restraining myself, I'll enjoy the relief of feeling the desires pass, and I'll remember that desires are not the problem. Feeling pushed around by them is. I'll continue to have desires, of course, because I'm alive, but they'll be more modest in their demands.

  Sylvia Boorstein

  Pain, Struggle, Temptation

  Sylvia Boorstein, Ph.D. (2007). “Pay Attention, for Goodness' Sake: Practicing the Perfections of the Heart--The Buddhist Path of Kindness”, p.54, Ballantine Books

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• Writing is an undertaking for the modest.

  Marianne Moore

  Writing, Undertakings

  Marianne Moore, Patricia C. Willis (1986). “The complete prose of Marianne Moore”, Viking Pr

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• I think I will be the most dressed [contestant and have] the most modest outfits for sure because that's who I am.

  Bristol Palin

  Thinking, Who I Am, Outfits

  "Bristol Palin Plans to Wear the 'Most Modest Outfits' on DWTS". people.com. August 31, 2010.

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• Although a life-long fashion dropout, I have absorbed enough by reading Harper's Bazaar while waiting at the dentist's to have grasped that the purpose of fashion is to make A Statement. My own modest Statement, discerned by true cognoscenti, is, "Woman Who Wears Clothes So She Won't Be Naked.

  Molly Ivins

  Fashion, Reading, Clothes

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• It is a modest creed, and yet Pleasant if one considers it, To own that death itself must be, Like all the rest, a mockery.

  Percy Bysshe Shelley

  Death, Creeds, Mockery

  Percy Bysshe Shelley (1845). “Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments”, p.8

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• To arrange a library is to practice in a quiet and modest way the art of criticism.

  Jorge Luis Borges

  Inspirational, Art, Practice

  Jorge Luis Borges, Adolfo Bioy Casares (1973). “Extraordinary tales”, International Specialized Book Services

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• In the deregulated realm of US banking and finance, crime does occasionally pay for its foul deeds, not in prison time but by making modest rebates to the victims.

  William Greider

  Prison Time, Doe, Banking

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• Not only is the Napoleonic dream stronger today in our imaginations than it has ever been, but one can already feel the slow falling away of moral opprobrium from our memory of Hitler. In another fifty years we may well find ourselves weighed down by a second monstrous dream of pure grandeur to match that of the Emperor. Two men who dared. Two men who were adored. Two men who led with brilliance. Two men who administered fairly and efficiently. Two men who were modest in their own needs but surrounded by lesser beings who profited from their situation and came between the Hero and the people.

  John Ralston Saul

  Dream, Memories, Fall

  John Ralston Saul (2013). “Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West”, p.74, Simon and Schuster

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• 'Strive for peace with all men, and for the holiness without which no one will see the Lord' (Heb. 12:14), Why did he say 'strive'? Because it is not possible for us to become holy and to be saints in an hour! We must therefore progress from modest beginnings toward holiness and purity. Even were we to spend a thousand years in this life we should never perfectly attain it. Rather we must always struggle for it every day, as if mere beginners.

  Symeon the New Theologian

  Christian, Struggle, Men

  Saint Symeon (the New Theologian) (1980). “Symeon New Theologian”, p.91, Paulist Press

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• I will try not to panic, to keep my standard of living modest and to work steadily, even shyly, in the spirit of those medieval carvers who so fondly sculpted the undersides of choir seats.

  John Updike

  Work, Trying, Panic

  John Updike, James Plath (1994). “Conversations with John Updike”, p.16, Univ. Press of Mississippi

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• It is in applied psychology, if anywhere, that today we should be modest and grant validity to a number of apparently contradictory opinions; for we are still far from having anything like a thorough knowledge of the human psyche, that most challenging field of scientific enquiry. For the present we have merely more or less plausible opinions that defy reconciliation.

  Carl Jung

  Knowledge, Numbers, Psychology

  "Modern Man in Search of a Soul". Book by Carl Jung, p. 57, 1933.

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• The more modest its intellectual ballast, the more exclusively it takes into consideration the emotions of the masses, the more effective [propaganda] will be.

  Adolf Hitler

  Media, Intellectual, Mein Kampf

  Adolf Hitler (1998). “Mein Kampf”, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Some of the greatest, most revolutionary advances in science have been given their initial expression in attractively modest terms, with no fanfare.

  Daniel Dennett

  Expression, Revolutionary, Given

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• If the factory people outside the colleges live under the discipline of narrow means, the people inside live under almost every other kind of discipline except that of narrow means -- from the fruity austerities of learning, through the iron rations of English gentlemanhood, down to the modest disadvantages of occupying cold stone buildings without central heating and having to cross two or three quadrangles to take a bath.

  Margaret Halsey

  Education, Mean, College

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