Still, the quote doesn’t have to be read as an attack on humility itself; it can be read as an insistence on intellectual honesty. Genuine humility recognizes limits while still naming strengths plainly. Meir’s jab targets false humility: the kind that exaggerates weakness to seem virtuous, or that invites reassurance from others.
This distinction matters because accurate self-knowledge is a foundation for growth. If you pretend to be worse than you are, you may avoid opportunities that would develop you; if you pretend to be better, you become reckless. Meir’s sentence compresses that idea into a blunt correction: be neither inflated nor theatrically small. [...]
