Humility Quotes

The common soldiers did not blame him for his excessive grief. They knew him. They knew his flaws. Indeed, I think they loved him all the more because he was flawed, as they were, and did not hide his passionate, blemished nature.

~ Geraldine Brooks

Inside that Colonel, there's a private that needs to be cuddled and held just like the rest of us. Hawkeye

~ M*A*S*H Episode Guide Team

People who sneer at a half a loaf of bread have never been hungry. George Reedy

~ Robert A. Caro

John’s standard maneuver to ask someone to help him, especially in a moment of crisis

~ William R. Forstchen

They loved the sound of their own voices. No decision would be reached anytime soon.

~ Stephen L. Carter

France, stop throwing awards at me! I have so many already, give them to people who need them.

~ Nuno Roque

Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.

~ Paul Brunton

To worship means to go higher. If you join the one who has gone higher, you will go higher and if you speak ill of that person, you will fall down.

~ Dada Bhagwan

He whose speech, behavior and humility captivates people’s minds, becomes worthy of worship by people.

~ Dada Bhagwan

Great humility brings great grace.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

With great humility brings great grace.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Creativity is the highest form of intelligence. Over time, after developing a more advanced creative brain, I started feeling that my college education was more so something to be ashamed of rather than something to be proud of.

~ Criss Jami

You will never be able to end any battle if the people involved are unable to see their own hypocrisy, or how their insecurity contributed to their problems. Wounded people often choose to play the victim, so they can restore their dignity in unhealthy ways. Sadly, they do this through feeling justified, by making bad choices or actions (that honestly no diety would want them to do). This inability to accept their part in their unhappiness keeps them from growing. They need your prayers more than your anger. Just walk away. Let it go and pray that one day they will understand your pain, as much as you do theirs. Remember: The sexiest woman alive is one that can walk away from a place that God doesn't want them to be. Do so with your head held high and forgive yourself and others. When you can do this, you will know what God's definition of class is-- YOU!

~ Shannon L. Alder

An intelligent person has knowledge, but a wise person has experience with humility.

~ Debasish Mridha M.d.

Science is knowledge meeting humility meeting curiosity: ever-evolving, always learning. Atheism is often but knowledge meeting arrogance: a masquerade under the wing of the beauty of science. Religion is infamously a weight under the one wing; then under the other is atheism, the championed masquerade.

~ Criss Jami

Rather than swallowing our pride and simply asking what we do not know, we choose to fill in the blanks ourselves and later become humbled. Wisdom was often, in its youth, proven foolish, and ones humiliated were meant to become wise.

~ Criss Jami

Only the man who thinks himself a fool is as wise as he thinks.

~ Criss Jami

Unsettling are the days in which everyone is an expert.

~ Criss Jami

Angels are good not simply because they see bad as bad, but also because they see bad as corny.

~ Criss Jami

Never take advice about never taking advice. That is an old vice of men - to dish it out without being able to take it - the blind leading the blind into more blindness.

~ Criss Jami

We do not have to have the correct answers to listen well. In fact, often the correct answers are a hindrance to listening well, for we become more anxious to give the correct answer than to hear.

~ Richard J. Foster

Be careful not to appear obsessively intellectual. When intelligence fills up, it overflows a parody.

~ Criss Jami

Every new generation believes its own period to be absolutely superior intellectually - greater than all past cultures yet equal among its modern cultures.

~ Criss Jami

The unteachable man is sentenced to being taught only by experience. The tragedy is he reaches nothing further than his own pain.

~ Criss Jami

Hu-man, Hu-mility, Hu-manity, is a title of nobility of the Perfected One, one who has knowledge of its self, and living its essence

~ Aainaa-Ridtz

We are one people until you decide we are one person in the churning sea of humanity.

~ Donavan Nelson Butler

Spiritual humility is not about getting small, not about debasing oneself, but about approaching everything and everyone else with a readiness to see goodness and to be surprised. This is the humility of a child, which Jesus lauded. It is the humility of the scientist and the mystic. It has a lightness of step, not a heaviness of heart. That lightness is the surest litmus test I know for recognizing wisdom when you see it in the world or feel its stirrings in yourself. The questions that can lead us are already alive in our midst, waiting to be summoned and made real. It is a joy to name them. It is a gift to plant them in our senses, our bodies, the places we inhabit, the part of the world we can see and touch and help to heal. It is a relief to claim our love of each other and take that on as an adventure, a calling. It is a pleasure to wonder at the mystery we are and find delight in the vastness of reality that is embedded in our beings. It is a privilege to hold something robust and resilient called hope, which has the power to shift the world on its axis.

~ Krista Tippett

A lack of empathy is the biggest crime of all.

~ A.s.l.

We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. (pg. 20, A Native Hill)

~ Wendell Berry

Until we understand what the land is, we are at odds with everything we touch. And to come to that understanding it is necessary, even now, to leave the regions of our conquest - the cleared fields, the towns and cities, the highways - and re-enter the woods. For only there can a man encounter the silence and the darkness of his own absence. Only in this silence and darkness can he recover the sense of the world's longevity, of its ability to thrive without him, of his inferiority to it and his dependence on it. Perhaps then, having heard that silence and seen that darkness, he will grow humble before the place and begin to take it in - to learn from it what it is. As its sounds come into his hearing, and its lights and colors come into his vision, and its odors come into his nostrils, then he may come into its presence as he never has before, and he will arrive in his place and will want to remain. His life will grow out of the ground like the other lives of the place, and take its place among them. He will be with them - neither ignorant of them, nor indifferent to them, nor against them - and so at last he will grow to be native-born. That is, he must reenter the silence and the darkness, and be born again.(pg. 27, A Native Hill)

~ Wendell Berry

For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.

~ Alain De Botton

But the Egotist is stuck somewhere between his hidden triad of pride, fear, and insecurity; he is forever fighting to prove himself, instigating battles the Humbleman has unwittingly conquered, already sealed some time ago. Yes, the day he finally accepts face-to-face such an irony as humility - the irony that humility is indeed the mother of giants, that great men, having life so large, as needed, can afford to appear small - the world will then know peace.

~ Criss Jami

No matter how kind you are, always expect a few imbeciles.

~ Criss Jami

Speaking a painful truth should be done only in love - like wielding a sword with no hilt - it should pain oneself in direct proportion to the amount of force exerted.

~ Criss Jami

The beauty of wisdom lies in simplicity and humility.

~ Debasish Mridha

Love yourself first to fill your heart with bliss. Now give it away with humility, love, and gratitude.

~ Debasish Mridha

We can ignore even pleasure. But pain insists upon being attended to. God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our conscience, but shouts in our pains: it is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.

~ C.s. Lewis

If pain doesn't lead to humility, you have wasted your suffering.

~ Katerina Stoykova Klemer

It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.

~ Darren Shan

Sorrow is humbling. I want my pain to be fabulous. I don't need my pain to be worse than anyone else's; I just want it to be strangely, uniquely mine. Art to someone else's breakdown. — Thea Hillman, Dear Kath

~ Clint Catalyst