Top 165 Modest Quotes

My philosophy is very much to encourage my children to forge their own success and happiness, even though that will undoubtedly involve much more modest levels of wealth creation.

Simplicity is not the goal. It is the by-product of a good idea and modest expectations.

I’m a very modest person.

The firm, the enduring, the simple, and the modest are near to virtue.

By gold all good faith has been banished; by gold our rights are abused; the law itself is influenced by gold, and soon there will be an end of every modest restraint.

I grew up in a modest neighborhood just outside of Los Angeles. It was an industrial community of blue-collar, working people… some of the hardest-working people I’ve ever met.

I have had the opportunity to become acquainted with many wonderful people from many walks of life. I have known rich and poor, famous and modest, wise and otherwise.

I think people get satisfaction from living for a cause that’s greater than themselves. They want to leave an imprint. By writing books, I’m trying to do that in a modest way.

The last time I visited Qaddafi was in May of 2001, 15 years after Reagan attacked his rather modest residence where he took me to show me how it had been left.

The awareness of our own strength makes us modest.

I lost 80 percent of my wealth and then gave away over half of the rest. So I’m a man of modest means now. But if you budget carefully and watch your expenditures, you can get by on a couple billion dollars.

My parents had us very young. We lived in a modest house. We built forts, we hiked, we went camping and they wanted us to be independent. It’s how children grew up in the 1940s and 50s: outside all the time, playing in the dirt, riding your bike around.

America tends to worship the modest talent because it doesn’t put us in an uncomfortable position vis-a-vis the artist.

All I wanted to do was write – at the time, poems, and prose, too. I guess my ambition was simply to make money however I could to keep myself going in some modest way, and I didn’t need much, I was unmarried at the time, no children.

I would like to win the Pulitzer Prize. I would like to win the Nobel Prize. I would like to win a Tony award for the Broadway musical I’m now working on. Aside from these, my aspirations are modest ones.

Truth of a modest sort I can promise you, and also sincerity. That complete, praiseworthy sincerity which, while it delivers one into the hands of one’s enemies, is as likely as not to embroil one with one’s friends.

I felt more doubtful than usual with ‘Goon Squad,’ because I knew that the book’s genre wasn’t easily named – Novel? Stories? Novel-in-stories? – and I worried that its lack of a clear category would count against it. My hopes for it were pretty modest.

People hear that and say I’m being modest, but I am not a modest person, but I have to be truthful about what I’m doing and what I’m doing is channeling.

Pete Seeger is a modest, unassuming, cheerful, and kind-natured man. He’s a good folk singer, if you can stand folk singing. And he’s such an excellent banjo player that you almost don’t wish you had a pair of wire cutters.

The extraordinary thing about my mother, she’s so modest about me.

Economists should be modest and be aware that they are part of the broader social science community. We need to be pragmatic about the methods we use. When we need to do history, we should do history. When we need to study political science, we should study political science.

Leaders should be collaborative, modest, and generous.

I’m a leftie, and I’ve always believed in doing things on a modest scale.

A poor worker is taxed heavily to receive his own money back with a modest supplement. Surely it would be more efficient just to pay the supplement and take him out of direct tax altogether.

My mother was a very natural woman. She never spoiled herself, never wore make-up, and wore modest jewellery, but she always had a few special items for when she wanted to feel like a lady. One of those special items – and I remember it because it seemed so elegant – was her Guerlain powder.

I have people who say, ‘You should dress up like this, or you should dress more modest; you should cover up more.’ And then, at the other end of the spectrum, you have, like, ‘Why are you still wearing your scarf? You’re in America, you know.’

I think a British icon is someone who conducts themself with real dignity: someone who is truly talented and modest. These are things that I would aspire to in my career.

I have had some amazing experiences as a musician – even with my modest skills.

Timidity makes a person modest. It makes him or her say, ‘I’m not worthy of being written up in the record of deeds in heaven or on earth.’ Timidity keeps people from their good. They are afraid to say, ‘Yes, I deserve it.’

To not be modest about it, you’ll find that with only a couple of exceptions, most of the musicians that I’ve worked with have done their best work by far with me.

The modest three hours a day I spend with my colleagues is about right – I certainly couldn’t imagine going into quarantine with them.

Audrey, it seems to me, never strove or hoped to leave a lasting legacy with her films – she was far too modest for that. But what I think she would have wanted, had she been given more time, would have been to continue her work for children because she knew that is a task with so much to be accomplished.

For better or for worse, in ‘The Last Savage,’ I have dared to do away completely with fashionable dissonance, and in a modest way, I have endeavored to rediscover the nobility of gracefulness and the pleasure of sweetness.

I thought if I was lucky it would be a nice, modest-sized, modest-budgeted film that would be a modest success. And then something happened.

The street I lived on for the first handful of years of my life was lined with modest, lower-middle-class houses with small front yards and cracked driveways – your typical North Jersey neighborhood, with all the odd hidden darkness that that implies.

I think I’ve become more modest as the years have gone on.

It well becomes a young man to be modest.

Newt Gingrich is a boastful kind of guy. But when it comes to Wall Street, the former House speaker is surprisingly modest.

Social democrats are characteristically modest – a political quality whose virtues are overestimated. We need to apologise a little less for our shortcomings and speak more assertively of achievements. That these were always incomplete should not trouble us.

I don’t take fancy vacations. I buy all my jewelry at Claire’s. I can’t remember the last time I went out to a fancy dinner. My family lives in a modest two-bedroom apartment, and my kids share a bedroom. But I do have one extravagant vice: shoes.

Cyberattacks have become a permanent fixture on the international scene because they have become easy and cheap to launch. Basic computer literacy and a modest budget can go a long way toward invading a country’s cyberspace.

I signed a very modest $3,000 bonus with the Braves in Milwaukee. And my old man didn’t have that kinda money to put out.

It was a challenge to be able to create a character without being able to use one’s normal set of expressions. All the rubber and makeup attached to your face left you with only a modest range of facial movements.

Because of ‘World War Z’ and ‘The Walking Dead,’ I can’t pitch a modest little zombie film which is meant to be sociopolitical.

Facebook draws from the public and public-interest sphere, a simultaneously bold and modest step towards acknowledging that our new networked technologies deeply affect our lives in ways not always captured or best shaped by the typical template of consumer and seller.

Too often, if you look back through the history of representation and you take the work of African-American artists, the work is on such a modest scale that it becomes sort of inconsequential.

In contrast to our sinking taste, there has been a revival of interest in verse drama in England, Scotland, and elsewhere. The movement has been slow but sure and, above all, modest in its demands.

Modesty is a learned affectation. And as soon as life slams the modest person against the wall, that modesty drops.

I think of myself as a shy, modest, relatively unassuming person.

I grew up in a very modest house. We were poor-we lived on the poverty level. We all got jobs as young kids.

Every writer dreams of having a backyard cottage, similar to Dahl’s ‘writing hut.’ English cottages and charming huts might seem out of reach, but a good carpenter could build a modest cottage on the cheap.

Once there was a boy so meek and modest, he was awarded a Most Humble badge. The next day, it was taken away because he wore it. Here endeth the lesson.

I’m intrigued by people who make their modest living doing good things for others. Teachers, nonprofit workers, librarians… those are the heroes in our society.

Yes, ‘Bonanza’ has made me very comfortable. I have a big four-level contemporary house in West Los Angeles and a modest summer home in East Marion, LI.

When you compare the relatively modest tax that will ensue from prohibiting companies from receiving a subsidy and deducting that subsidy, the benefits dramatically outweigh the costs.

When humans team up with computers to play chess, the humans who do best are not necessarily the strongest players. They’re the ones who are modest and who know when to listen to the computer. Often, what the human adds is knowledge of when the computer needs to look more deeply.

Corney & Barrow are proud to have the royal warrant, meaning that they provide the Palace with some of the greatest – and necessarily most expensive – wines from around the world. I am pleased to say that they also hold my own warrant, for providing exceptional wines at – surprisingly – modest prices.

To see a small, modest team built on hard work, where the players are so close, so together, win week after week, stay up there and play so well, when they’re so consistent and they win the league, that makes people take them to their hearts.

Politics is a place of humble hopes and strangely modest requirements, where all are good who are not criminal and all are wise who are not ridiculously otherwise.

I’m quite modest. I don’t want to tell people I’m a leader.

Singing in character you can be more of a show off or more modest because it isn’t yourself it’s a nice way to sing, unusual, a bit like being in musical I guess.

Inflation is lower and more stable and the real business cycle fluctuations are more modest.

I have often wondered what my life would have been like if I had needed a size thirty-eight bra instead of a modest thirty-four.

I do feel it’s hard to be modest and humble and egoless when people are telling you you are so great and wanting to give you prizes and energy. I’m trying hard not to be an awful, narcissistic human being.

No person who is well bred, kind and modest is ever offensively plain; all real deformity means want for manners or of heart.

‘Conservative’ is a term that resonates differently with people. For us, Tae and I take that as being modest. The easiest way to put it is, if there’s a little girl in the audience, and she’s looking at us, I want her parents to feel comfortable with her admiring us and looking up to us.

Once a popular Alaska governor with a modest record of accomplishment, Palin could conceivably revive her reputation in this era of short memories. But it’s hard to imagine her name atop the GOP ballot in 2016, when a cast of heavyweights who sat out 2012 will be vying for the nomination.

To be very modest about what is happening in my life and my career over the last couple of years, I did not know if I would go on to play Test cricket when we were in the pandemic, in the lockdown.

I was very uneasy about going into cosmology because the experimental observations were so modest.

You will not see me dressed in plain, modest outfits.

I have had the good fortune to live – as an inside witness and, even, a modest participant – at a time when our understanding of this wonder we call ‘life’ has made its most revolutionary advances.

No modest man ever did or ever will make a fortune.

Eric Ashcroft, a gentle, kind, popular man with a wicked sense of humour, was always modest about his wartime exploits, but eventually, with much prompting from his persistent son, he told me of his terrifying experience on D-Day.

For relatively modest amounts of sulfur dioxide injected into the atmosphere, you could easily cool Earth by 1% or more, if you want.

What I value is that I have been able to do some modest work to help women rise to the level of their potential.

I would love to have my own fashion line. I love modest clothing that’s still flirty.

Mother set impossibly high standards for us, creating tremendous pressures and undermining our ability to accomplish whatever modest aims we may have set for ourselves.

I will continue to distribute blankets, sleeping bags, warm clothing and food on a regular basis, in the hope that my modest efforts will give some comfort to those people we are able help.

I am one of the most famous people in Russia, which is maybe not modest, but it’s true.

Some are made modest by great praise, others insolent.

Joining Modest Mouse was just consistent with what I used to do as a teenager: I followed where I thought I would make some interesting music.

I was brought up to do my duty. Not to be vain, not to shout from the rooftops about my virtues – to be modest and well-behaved. I’m totally wrong for show business.

I started out from a pretty modest background, so I always had a pretty good sense of money. I always had to work for my money, save my own money, I always bought my own stuff with my money… trying not to waste money unnecessarily.

I grew up in a very modest home. We grew a lot of our food in our backyard. We fished; my brothers hunted.

I think a lot of people think I was born in a blue suit, on the David Brinkley show. And that isn’t me. I am much more that kid who grew up in South St. Louis, in a very modest household, with a simple background with parents who didn’t get through high school.

We’ve always actually been remarkably commercially successful. Not in terms of making huge amounts of money, which we rarely do, but in terms of not losing money and making modest amounts of money. We’re actually strangely consistent in that respect.

To test a modest man’s modesty do not investigate if he ignores applause, find out if he abides criticism.

Students come away with a clear message about how admissions works: If you have money, connections or ‘insider’ knowledge, you have a leg up. It’s hardly surprising that many students of modest or lower means decide it’s not even worth playing.

I try to be very modest with what I do. I’m not a frivolous spender.

Sarcasm: the last refuge of modest and chaste-souled people when the privacy of their soul is coarsely and intrusively invaded.

Since 2012, the USPS has not been able to meet its prefunding requirement, but without it, the agency would have made a modest operating profit every year since 2013.

The true color of life is the color of the body, the color of the covered red, the implicit and not explicit red of the living heart and the pulses. It is the modest color of the unpublished blood.

With technological advances, there’s a very natural curve between cost and complexity and adoption. When the cost and complexity are high, the adoption rate is – let’s call it ‘modest.’

I kind of feel like the job of actors and writers and people who make television and movies is to keep people company. In whatever modest way I’m able to accomplish that, I want to.

Gain a modest reputation for being unreliable and you will never be asked to do a thing.

I just owe almost everything to my father and it’s passionately interesting for me that the things that I learned in a small town, in a very modest home, are just the things that I believe have won the election.

Is the raggle-taggle Brangelina tribe any more bogus than that of the landlocked yummy mummy who believes that she can drop half a dozen brats and still keep a modest carbon footprint? I don’t think so.

I grew up as a baseball player, and given my modest size, it was always clear that I would end up playing in the infield.

I come from an extremely modest background. So now I have way more than what I’m used to.

With a modest amount of looks and talent, and more than a modicum of serendipity, I’ve managed to stretch my 15 minutes of fame into 50 years of good fortune.

The bottom line is this: Cash, in modest increments, has a role in any portfolio. But unless you are Warren Buffett, you should limit it to 2 or 3 percent.

In 1988, federal data showed a modest China-trade surplus of $1.6 billion in Canada’s favour.

I’m not shy. I’m modest, but I’m very outgoing.

Look at anyone’s bookcase at home, no matter how modest, and you’re going to find a book that contains wisdom or ideas or a language that’s at least a thousand years old. And the idea that humans have created a mechanism to time travel, to hurl ideas into the future, it sort of bookends. Books are a time machine.

It’s always been hard trying to find the right pieces that go together, but it’s always been something that interests me – finding new ways to be fashionable and cute but still being modest.

The college that takes students with modest entering abilities and improves their abilities substantially contributes more than the school that takes very bright students and helps them develop only modestly.

College professors used to be badly paid and worth it. Colleges used to be modest institutions; they should go back to being modest institutions.

I find it more consoling to think of myself as little than to think of myself as big. I think I’ve gotten that from animals, particularly dogs. Dogs live such a modest life, and they don’t live long, and the more you’re around them, you kind of accept that.

When I was young, my ambitions were very modest. I thought, ‘If only I could play at the battle of the bands at the Y, that would be the culmination of existence!’ And then the roller rink, and you work your way up branch by branch.

We’re going to reserve our efforts and our national solidarity for the most humble, the most modest, and the most poor among us.

Nobody who takes on anything big and tough can afford to be modest.

What makes you better is not playing every single game in a modest championship. What makes you better is playing 10 games in a very competitive league.

The modest person is usually admired, if people ever hear of them.

If architects weren’t arrogant, they wouldn’t be architects. I don’t know a modest good architect.

Paris is the most modest girl.

I made a point when I made the Ugly Casanova record to not write a song and then say, ‘This is a Modest Mouse song’ or ‘This is an Ugly Casanova song.’ The people who were open to it not being a Modest Mouse record liked it.

Oh my goodness gracious, what you can buy off the Internet in terms of overhead photography. A trained ape can know an awful lot of what is going on in this world, just by punching on his mouse, for a relatively modest cost.

I come from a modest background. I put myself through college and law school and a postdoctorate program in tax law.

I liked flying, when I got into it, loved it. And I found I was very good at it. I’m not modest about the fact that I was a good pilot.

I had a very modest upbringing.

I am rather proud of my modest contribution to bringing democracy home.

But you have to understand that I consider myself a very modest artist, or whatever, and not of importance really at all – it is quite embarrassing to me to be asked my opinion about things. I am only a wee Scottish poet on the outside of everything.

Daffodils, blossom and tulips jostle to the front of the stage in April. I love these early perennials: they may be more modest but they nearly all have that one special quality that a plant needs to transform your affections from admiration to affection – charm.

A modest man is usually admired, if people ever hear of him.

I am a birthday person. I am not modest about birthdays.

Hoover himself had risen from the most modest means of any president since Abraham Lincoln. Orphaned as a small boy, he worked his way through Stanford’s ‘pioneer’ class – the first freshmen at Stanford. He started his mining career in hard labor.

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

For example, Michael Jordan earns $100million a year but continues to play basketball and remains a modest human being.

There’s so much that can be learned from French cooking, especially really traditional, more modest meals.

Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.

I wasn’t trying to top Pulp Fiction with Jackie Brown. I wanted to go underneath it and make a more modest character study movie.

When immigration proceeds at a steady but modest clip, deep change comes slowly, and there’s time for assimilation to do its work.

The only possible role that I can see for reconciliation would be to make modest changes in the major package to improve affordability, to deal with what share of Medicaid expansion the federal government pays, those kinds of issues, which is the traditional role for reconciliation in health care.

Let’s find those areas where modest and reasonable tax cuts will have the biggest positive impact on our economy, and which will improve the lives of those who need it most: working families, retirees, and small business owners.

The Constitution was written by 55 educated and highly intelligent men in Philadelphia in 1787, but it was written so that it could be understood by people of limited education and modest intelligence.

Wearing modest clothing is a belief, and I’m not going to say that every Muslim woman is in my shoes, but the majority of us do have a choice.

Honestly, I grew up in pretty modest circumstances. We were a middle-class family.

True humility is intelligent self respect which keeps us from thinking too highly or too meanly of ourselves. It makes us modest by reminding us how far we have come short of what we can be.

I’ve been a director and chairman of three good, modest clubs – Coventry, Charlton and Fulham – and the abuse you get can be cruel and shameful. I’ve had a wonderful life and wouldn’t change a moment of it professionally – except that I should never have become a director.

Publicly I’m a very modest dresser, by Hollywood’s standards.

Despite the apparent trappings of modest success in television and so on, I have always been an uneasy person. I can’t change that. I can’t change that part of my psychological makeup.

Intelligent design is a modest position theologically and philosophically. It attributes the complexity and diversity of life to intelligence, but does not identify that intelligence with the God of any religious faith or philosophical system.

There’s nothing wrong with giving yourself a pat on the back. If you can’t do that, you can’t be objective about your work. You can’t be conceited or cocky either, but you can’t be too modest either.

I’ve interviewed multiple people who know bin Laden… who tend to have a universal picture of what he’s like, which is: modest, retiring, unassuming, kind of thoughtful – lots of things that don’t fit with a mass murderer, which he is as well.

Boys are quite often whimsical. Whereas girls are modest by nature and know their responsibilities very well. Their weapons are service, sacrifice, and love, by which they conquer over the males.

I had very modest expectations when I first moved to New York. I didn’t even expect to get a record deal.

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.

I grew up in Fall River, Massachusetts. My background was modest, and I worked at a Portuguese bakery in town.

Of course I’ve already taken a very modest position on the monetary system, I do take the position that we should just end the Fed.

You can be only a modest distance away from the gravity brane, and gravity will be incredibly weak.

I really had a great time working with ‘Modest Mouse,’ just because of the people. I loved writing songs with Isaac Brock, and Jeremiah Green is probably my favorite musician that I’ve worked with.

We believe in lowering taxes for everyone, and those tax reductions should be targeted at people with middle and modest incomes, and I don’t say that rhetorically.

One of the challenges for sub-Saharan Africa is that markets are of modest size. This makes regional integration important.

Comic-strip artists generally have very modest ambitions. Day to day, we labor to fit together all these little moving parts – a character or two, a few lines of dialogue, framing, pacing, payoff – but we certainly don’t think of them adding up over time to some larger portrait of our times.

Enjoy the magic of compounding returns. Even modest investments made in one’s early 20s are likely to grow to staggering amounts over the course of an investment lifetime.

The ‘Scowcroft Model’ recognizes – and embraces – the unique but necessarily modest place the National Security Council and the national security adviser occupy in the American national security architecture.

The musician is perhaps the most modest of animals, but he is also the proudest. It is he who invented the sublime art of ruining poetry.

As a consequence while we had a roof over our heads, food on the table, and clothes to wear to school we were constantly conscious of being of modest means.

An appreciable number of directors have shifted to lower-cost films, allowing them to be satisfied with a more modest return.

The odds of being successful are the same for every group that is educated in America. It’s just that the group that is not wealthy is 95 percent of the population. So if there are 100 successful people in a room, probably 95 out of 100 came from more modest means.

Every author, however modest, keeps a most outrageous vanity chained like a madman in the padded cell of his breast.

Social Security was designed to give a few years of modest benefits to people whose bodies were worn out through coal mining, factory work and other physically demanding labor.

I think Putin will have to find a way to signal, even if it’s a modest signal, an openness to dialogue.

My father once said about being a parent that it is the only thing you do that requires a very long period of learning, and at about the time that you are becoming competent, you don’t need the skills anymore. Notwithstanding this modest assessment of their parenting skills, they were wonderful parents.

I’ve never wanted to get adjusted to my income, because I knew I wanted to go back to public service. And in comparison to what my mother earns and how I was raised, it’s not modest at all. I have no right to complain.