Mastery passes often for egotism. – Johann von Goethe

He who does not think much of himself is much more esteemed than he imagines. – Johann von Goethe

The pest of society are the egotist, they are dull and bright, sacred and profane, course and fine. It is a disease that like the flu falls on all constitutions. – Ralph Waldo Emerson

I is a militant social tendency, working to hold and enlarge its place in the general current of tendencies. So far as it can it waxes, as all life does. To think of it as apart from society is a palpable absurdity of which no one could be guilty who really saw it as a fact of life. – Charles Horton Cooley