Skip to content
quotesby

About this quote

What does it mean?
True moral conviction may require abandoning modesty when it conflicts with conscience.
In plain terms
If conscience and modesty clash, choose conscience.
What can you take from it?
Conscience overrides false humility.

Where it applies

  • moral dilemmas
  • public speaking
  • leadership

Putting it to work

  • speaking truth to power
  • setting boundaries

Questions to consider

  • When must you choose between feeling and doing?
  • What is false modesty?

Another view

Modesty can be a virtue; not all modesty is false.

More from Harriet Martineau

  1. For my own part, I had rather suffer any inconvenience from having to work occasionally in chambers and kitchen ... than witness the subservience in which the …

    Permalink to quote #2
  2. What office is there which involves more responsibility, which requires more qualifications, and which ought, therefore, to be more honourable, than that of te…

    Permalink to quote #4
  3. If a test of civilization be sought, none can be so sure as the condition of that half of society over which the other half has power.

    Permalink to quote #1

Related quotes

  1. The Non-Conformist Conscience makes cowards of us all.

    Max BeerbohmMax Beerbohm quote #1
  2. Do what you feel in your heart to be right - for you'll be criticized anyway. You'll be 'damned if you do, and damned if you don't.'

    Eleanor RooseveltEleanor Roosevelt quote #1
  3. Come back again, old heart! Ah me! Methinks in those thy coward fears There might, perchance, a courage be, That fails in these the manlier years; Courage to l…

    Arthur Hugh CloughArthur Hugh Clough quote #3