Life & Wisdom Quote by Abraham Cahan

Moral self-confidence is a slippery drug: it starts as reassurance and ends as vanity. Cahan’s warning aims at that precise moment when “being good” becomes a personality rather than a practice. The line is built on a quiet paradox: goodness, if genuine, should make you less smug, not more. Once pride enters, the goodness curdles into performance - a way to rank yourself above others, to demand credit, to feel entitled to leniency.

Cahan’s context matters. As a Jewish immigrant writer and longtime editor of the Yiddish Forward, he watched how ideals harden inside real communities: socialists who preached equality yet loved status, pious moralists who used virtue as a cudgel, upwardly mobile strivers who turned hardship into a badge of superiority. In that world, goodness is contested terrain - not a private halo but social currency. Pride is what converts ethics into a hierarchy.

The syntax is plain, almost parental, which is part of its force. “If you feel” places the emphasis on self-perception, not objective virtue; it’s the inner narration that needs suspicion. “Don’t be too proud” doesn’t outlaw pride altogether, it caps it, acknowledging how easily moral life slides into self-congratulation. The subtext: your sense of goodness is likely incomplete, contingent, and helped along by luck, community, and circumstance. Humility isn’t an accessory to virtue here; it’s the safeguard that keeps virtue from becoming another kind of selfishness.