Certain plants never grow except in certain soils, edelweiss in the Alps, bananas in the tropics, and cacti in the sands of the desert. Wherever you find the plant called Humility in the human garden you will always discover real wisdom in the brain-soil that produces it.
The habit of positivity has the true flavor of ignorance, for if one is always certain he is usually wrong. Humbugs, impostors, frauds, and sciolists never hesitate; but when you talk to a man of genuine learning, mature experience, and thorough culture, such a man as Mark Hopkins or President Eliot, the thing that strikes you most in him is his almost childlike modesty. When once you have learned that it is as sure a sign of wisdom to say you do not know as to say you do know, when you have learned that it is pretense and not ignorance that is shameful, when you want to be esteemed for nothing except what you really are, and to hate nothing so much as to be praised for what you are not, then you can be at ease in any company, everybody from servant to savant will enjoy you, and, as was said of Robert Burns, you will be equally at home in the society of farm laborers and the polite world.
Genuineness and Modesty are the Keys of Friendship.
