l more frequently:

"No, I haven't entered the lists. I am absolutely without ambition!"

Under similar circumstances people who are unknown cry out, and with
reason:

"Oh! I have a horror of publicity!"

This is simply a roundabout way of informing us that were it not for
their retiring modesty, the hundred mouths of rumor would be shouting
their praise.

Modesty is very rarely what it appears to be. As soon as it exhibits the
form of a wise reserve it must be called by another name: prudence and
self-justification.

The attitude of trying to keep one's actions from becoming known is not
a laudable one, and can only be adopted as the result of a philosophy of
inaction.

What treasures of knowledge would have remained unknown to us if all the
scientists and all the men of genius had made a practise of modesty!

If our forefathers had been modest, when it was the fashion to be proud
of this quality, our museums would be empty and only a few of the
initiated would know that men of exceptional merit, which they had
sedulously concealed, had written manuscripts which had never been
published. The humility of the writers in such cases could be made to
pay too severe a penalty.

No! Men who have merits are not modest! This false virtue is the
appanage of none but weak and irresolute hearts.

We should congratulate ourselves, while admitting these facts, that our
forefathers were not so constituted, and that their faith in themselves,
by giving them confidence in their own work, made it possible for them
to hand these on to their descendants.

Of what use to us would it be to know that a poem of finer quality and
more splendid fire than any we have ever read had once been written, if
the modesty of its author had led him to keep it always in his pocket
and it had finally vanished into the limbo of ignored and forgotten
things?

It is then actually wrong to sing the praises of modesty, which is no
more than distrust of oneself, egoism, and laziness.

The man who boasts of his modesty will feel no shame at producing
nothing. He hides his ineptitude behind this convenient veil whose
thickness allows him to hint of the existence of things which are
nothing but figments of his imagination.

We might add that the man who proclaims his modesty enters the struggle
with a decided handicap against him. The moment he begins to have doubts
about his own powers he will be sure to find himself the prey of an
unfortunate i