Effacing Quotes

#1. Those who are silent, self-effacing and attentive become the recipients of confidences.

Thornton Wilder

#2. Being humble does not mean being weak, reticent, or self-effacing. It means recognizing principle and putting it ahead of self. It means standing firmly for principle, even in the fact of opposition.

Stephen Covey

#3. Compared to high-profile leaders with big personalities who make headlines and become celebrities, the good-to-great leaders seem to have come from Mars. Self-effacing, quiet, reserved, even shy - these leaders are a paradoxical blend of personal humility and professional will. They

James C. Collins

#4. I'm drawn to girls with a certain self-effacing, humorous quality and an innate independence and point of view. I love the notion of never taking yourself too seriously or being too put together.

Chris Benz

#5. Too many people are confusing charisma with autocrat, fat cat. So I think we have to be a little more sophisticated when we hold up or tear down these stereotypes. Whether we call it charisma or not, a leader cannot be self-effacing to the point of being wimpy.

Noel Tichy

#6. In regards to being a fashion aficionado, there's a certain amount of taking yourself seriously in the professional world. The self-effacing person can't completely go down the serious road. But I design, and love when things are beautiful.

St. Vincent

#7. What I call Professionalism someone else might call the Artist's Code or the Warrior's Way. It's an attitude of egolessness and service. The Knights of the Round Table were chaste and self-effacing. Yet they dueled dragons.

Steven Pressfield

#8. They were self-effacing people who constantly asked questions and had the ability to confront the most brutal answers - that is, to look failures in the face, even their own, while maintaining faith that they would succeed in the end.

Carol S. Dweck

#9. More than half of my life is past; I have left only the time I need for turning the rest of it to account and for effacing my errors by my virtues.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

#10. I think growing up in Indiana prepares anyone for a life in comedy. I do feel like there is a certain kind of self-effacing cynicism among all Hoosiers.

Jim Gaffigan

#11. There is ugliness of mass production and consumerism, the banality of advertising. Although it claims to do just the opposite, it's predicated on disempowering and effacing persons.

Stephanie Mills

#12. [he] was a quiet, self-effacing boy - like a shy guest at the party of his own life.

Arnaldur Indridason

#13. Waited for sleep, that gentle mockery of death, to take me. I longed for its effacing grace. But its peace eluded me, and I rose from the bed, my head pounding from the salty torrent of my tears and the ache deep in my stomach.

Rick Yancey

#14. The larger the ego, the less the need for other egos around. The more modest, humble, and self-effacing we feel, the more we suffer from solitude, feeling ourselves inadequate company.

Barbara Holland

#15. ... Some people, under a nervous and self-effacing manner, conceal a great deal of vanity and self-satisfaction.

Agatha Christie

#16. A geek is a person, male or female, with an abiding, obsessive, self-effacing, even self-destroying love for something besides status

D. B. Weiss

#17. Until self-effacing men return again to spiritual leadership, we may expect a progressive deterioration in the quality of popular Christianity year after year till we reach the point where the grieved Holy Spirit withdraws - like the Shekinah from the temple.

Aiden Wilson Tozer

#18. My work is really abject and self-effacing sometimes. I mean, it's big and overwrought, but it's just paper dolls, and it's kind of silly.

Kara Walker

#19. It's self-effacing, it's hard-luck, the shtetl stories. All those Coasters things are an amalgam of Yiddish and black humor.

Jerry Leiber

#20. Women are always self-effacing and self-denying. There's a term that enrages me, and I always used to swear that I'd never play characters described that way. The term is "long-suffering."

Helen Mirren

#21. In many ways, I've chosen to be plain, almost too plain, too self-effacing. Like, if I record a vocal and I don't like the way it sounds, I would have them turn it up and take the reverb off it to make it as plain as possible.

Ben Folds

#22. Evan Handler is not only a fine actor, he's a damn good writer. It's Only Temporary is wise and funny and as righteously indignant as it is endearingly self-effacing. In what may be a literary first, the book actually left me wanting more.

Meghan Daum

#23. If by chance I seated myself to write, she very slyly, very tenderly, seeking protection and caresses, would softly take her place on my knee and follow the comings and goings of my pen - sometimes effacing, with an unintentional stroke of her paw, lines of whose tenor she disapproved.

Pierre Loti

#24. Nanny Ogg was about to say: What? You mean not compliant and self-effacing like what you is, Esme? But she stopped herself. You didn't juggle matches in a fireworks factory.

Terry Pratchett

#25. Dexter is modest, even self-effacing, and certainly aware of the limits of his considerable talent. But if there was a limit to what I could discover on the computer, I had not found it yet. I sat back down and went to work.

Jeff Lindsay

#26. dishonor is like a scar on a tree, which time, instead of effacing, only helps to enlarge." Mencius

Inazo Nitobe

#27. One thing Arnold Schwarzenegger isn't is self-effacing. Everything has to be the biggest. His money, his muscles, his movies and his machines.

Arnold Schwarzenegger

#28. They possess the self- effacing virtues of people who are inclined to be useful but don't need to prove anything to the world:

David Brooks

#29. What I see as specially English is the charm - everyone is so polite. Being restrained is part of the charm. And I love the sense of humour - it takes me back to Australia. The English are great at making fun of themselves. They're so self-effacing.

Danielle De Niese

#30. Oh! weep not that our beauty wears Beneath the wings of Time; That age o'erclouds the brow with cares That once was raised sublime ... But mourn the inward wreck we feel As hoary years depart, And Time's effacing fingers steal Young feelings from the heart!

Robert Montgomery

#31. I am thinking of the onion again ... Not self-righteous like the proletarian potato, nor a siren like the apple. No show-off like the banana. But a modest, self-effacing vegetable, questioning, introspective, peeling itself away, or merely radiating halos like ripples.

Erica Jong

#32. A curious thing happened: the terrains of England began to impinge on my consciousness, altering, then effacing, the world outside the library window ... I was wrapped in a pleasurable dreaminess. I was in a better place. If true life existed elsewhere, then I had almost found it.

Garry Disher

#33. You should never try irony or self-effacing humour.

Tim Robbins