Embracing Humility: Lessons from 'A Gentleman in Moscow'

"When one experiences a profound setback from an enviable life, one has a variety of options. Spurned by shame, one can hide the evidence of their change in circumstances. So a merchant having gambled away all of his money might wear his suits until they were afraid and tell anecdotes about life in clubs to which he no longer belongs." [00:02:02]

"Or, in a state of safe self-pity, one may retreat from the world in which one was blessed to live. So a long-suffering husband, having been publicly shamed by his wife, might be the one to move out of a house and into a poor dark apartment on the other side of town." [00:02:31]

"Like the count in Anna, one may simply join the confederacy of the humbled. And in the confederacy of the humble you don't try to hide, you don't try to go someplace else, you don't try to avoid, you don't try to escape, you don't try to pretend, you don't try to convince, you simply allow reality to be what it is." [00:02:52]

"The confederacy of the humbled is a close-knit brotherhood whose members travel with no outward markings but know each other at a glance. For being suddenly fallen from a state of grace, those in the confederacy share a certain set of perspectives, knowing beauty, influence, fame, and privilege to be borrowed rather than bestowed." [00:03:40]

"They are not easily impressed, they are not quick to envy or take offense. They certainly do not scour the papers searching for their names or we might say in our day they don't google themselves a lot. They're not counting up followers or likes, they remain committed to living among their peers." [00:04:06]

"This is the confederacy of the humbled, and it was begun a long time ago by a man named Jesus, who left a formerly enviable position in life, left that state of grace, who being in very nature God did not consider equality with God to be grounds for grasping but poured himself out, taking on the very form of a servant." [00:04:39]

"Being found in appearance as a human being he joined the confederacy of the humbled, he humbled himself, he became obedient to death, even death on a cross, and he invites you and I, anybody who wants to, anybody who falls from an enviable position in life to enter into his little community, the confederacy of the humbled." [00:05:09]

"The count in this book has another wonderful observation. At one point a woman leaves a child with him and the child is only maybe four years old but the mother is unable ever to return and so the count ends up becoming a surrogate father, and this man who had been quite a charming aristocrat benign but quite self-centered." [00:05:54]

"This man who had all the conveniences of life at his fingertips and those are the things that we think of as being part of the good life that we're trying to achieve lost them all, and ended up being enormously inconvenienced particularly by this child and then by his circumstances and so whatever goods he has has to go to the raising of this child." [00:06:28]

"These are the great conveniences of life, to be able to sleep until noon and have someone bring you breakfast on a tray, to be able to cancel an appointment at a moment's notice and when you're at the top of the ladder you can do that, to have a carriage always waiting for you at one party ready to whisk you away at a moment's notice to another party." [00:07:01]

"But in the end it is the inconveniences that matter, it is the being needed, it is the requirement of sacrifices, it is the giving of time, it is the looking at how can I love this one, how can I devote myself to a person in a situation where I am not in control but I can try to give it the best that I have." [00:07:49]

"It is in the end it is not life it's not about the accumulation of circumstances it is not about the accumulation of conveniences it is the inconveniences that matter, and this too we learn from the founder of the confederacy of the humbled." [00:08:17]