Life & Wisdom Quote by Shmuel Y. Agnon

Agnon’s humility lands less as a saintly pose than as a deliberately calibrated stance in a culture where spiritual status and intellectual pedigree are always being measured. “For myself” is doing quiet, strategic work: it frames modesty as an internal discipline, not a bid for public approval. He isn’t asking to be seen as small by others; he’s insisting that the only scale that matters is the one inside his own gaze.

“In my own eyes” sharpens the knife. This is not the democratic humility of “we’re all equal,” but a self-surveillance that feels distinctly Jewish and distinctly modern: conscience as a courtroom you can’t exit. In Agnon’s world - steeped in tradition, study, and the psychic aftershocks of displacement - the self is both precious and suspect. Smallness becomes a guardrail against vanity, but also a way to stay porous to something larger: law, language, God, history. It’s an antidote to the writer’s occupational hazard, the temptation to treat personal voice as a throne.

The line also carries a faint, knowing tension. Agnon was not “small” in any external sense: Nobel laureate, canonical figure, master of a highly wrought Hebrew style. When someone of that stature claims littleness, it can read as piety; it can also read as an artist’s recognition that the work always exceeds the worker. The subtext is bracing: if you want to write truthfully about a people, a tradition, or an era, you shrink the ego first, because history will do it for you anyway.