Humility Quotes

Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.

~ Dag Hammarskjöld

Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can’t hear it.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.

~ Craig D. Lounsbrough

I do not wish to talk about myself because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person.

~ Remedios Varo

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

~ Paul C. Nagel

Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired.

~ Ron Suskind

He must become an apprentice to ordinary life.

~ Paul C. Nagel

The tailor put on the girdle, and resolved to go forth into the world, because he thought his workshop was too small for his valor.

~ Jacob Grimm

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful.

~ Criss Jami

If there is one thing the psychic taught me, it's that people and events are rarely who and what we think they are. They are more meaningful, more worth our attention-part of some finely choreographed, eternal dance that we would be wise to bow down before in gratitude and humility.

~ Leslie Morgan Steiner

The actual confident man, the man truly sure of himself, is not he who esteems himself higher than others, but he who is sure enough that he can bear to esteem others higher than himself.

~ Criss Jami

watch out for schools that promise your kids will experience success. I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.

~ David Kahn

A great man is always willing to be little.

~ Ralph Waldo Emerson

There are two circumstances that lead to arrogance: one is when you're wrong and you can't face it, the other is when you're right and nobody else can face it.

~ Criss Jami

Confidence is this: Wearing your triumphs with humility, and wearing your scars with pride. Many of us do precisely the opposite.

~ Umair Haque

My confidence is in the idea that I may be wrong on this or that. No man in this life should ever have to bear the burden of perfection.

~ Criss Jami

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say I don't know. He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.

~ Nassim Nicholas Taleb

Ask with Confidence, listen with humility.

~ Charlie Van Hecke

There is something really good to say about humility. Being confident and humble is a great combination, maybe the best of all!

~ Ziad K. Abdelnour

Summers was simply a master explainer, able to deftly boil down the complexities of economic and financial, and to put them in terms the non-expert could understand. He was brilliant at cultivating a sense of control, even as events spun far beyond what could be managed with any certainty. He could will into being the confidence that eluded others, those less self-assured and, maybe sensibly, on humbler terms with the world.

~ Ron Suskind

Damage control is part of life. It would be better to never make a mistake, but once it's made it's best to handle it with grace and humility. Sometimes that shows others more than our failures ever could.

~ Rev. Kellen Roggenbuck

I keep a vivid memory of failure in my back pocket, so no matter how much I accomplish I stay grounded.

~ Noel Dejesus

My greatest concern is not whether you have failed, but whether you are concerned with your failure.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Yet so often it seems that victory eludes us. It is when our self-confidence is finally destroyed and is replaced with dependence upon God that we have victory.

~ K.p. Yohannan

But the truth is that there is no more conscious inconsistency between the humility of a Christian and the rapacity of a Christian than there is between the humility of a lover and the rapacity of a lover. The truth is that there are no things for which men will make such herculean efforts as the things of which they know they are unworthy. There never was a man in love who did not declare that, if he strained every nerve to breaking, he was going to have his desire. And there never was a man in love who did not declare also that he ought not to have it.

~ G.k. Chesterton

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'The husband, unlike the manager or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.

~ Wendell Berry

The Holy Spirit's instruments have no consciousness of His purpose; if they imagine they have, it is a pretty sure token that they are NOT His instruments. Nathaniel Hawthorne

~ Eugene H. Peterson

It's okay to be honest about not knowing rather than spreading falsehood. While it is often said that honesty is the best policy, silence is the second best policy.

~ Criss Jami

The beauty of the soul is wrapped in modest fashion.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Albeit i may die sleep not in the coffen of gold and even beer no fruit, but my impact after depart is my particular to paradise.

~ Oladosu Feyikogbon

If you think someone is humble, never tell them so. You will unknowingly rob them of the very thing you admire.

~ Christy Hall

There is no way to genuinely, powerfully, truly love yourself while crafting a mask of perfection. I know, you know, we all know—it's hard to let your pimples and your flaws be seen. It's hard to stumble and bumble. It's hard to not know the right things to do or say. It's hard to not look like TV.Sometimes, it's really hard for me to be the awkward mess that I am when I'm authentic, instead of having runway authenticity—all natural, but flawless. But every time I allow that to be okay, not just around myself but around others—I affirm something to myself. I affirm, to myself more than anyone else, that I am lovable and acceptable unconditionally. I affirm that it's okay to take on and take in all the flavours and hues of human experience, and not just the ones that are acceptable in this culture, in this time, in this place.And that kind of acceptance, that kind of love—that's the kind of love that creates miracles. That's the kind of love I really need. That's the kind of love that makes approval taste like cardboard.

~ Vironika Tugaleva

Love does not envy, does not boast, does not delight in evil but rejoice in truth.

~ Lailah Gifty Akita

Narcissists are everywhere in this ripe age of self-love, which amazes me because so much in life would seem to foster humility.

~ Dean Koontz

He (Lincoln) differed from fanatical moralists primarily in that he was always perplexed. No sooner did he believe he was doing God's will that he began to admit that God's purposes might be different from his own. In short, he never forgot the men's contrast between the absolute goodness of God and the faltering goodness of all who are in the finite predicament.

~ Elton Trueblood

In our moments in the sun beware of casting dark shadows.

~ Jason Versey

I went to Guatemala to help build a school but left wondering what help would really look like... I hadn't prepared myself for how humbled I'd feel, or how hard it would be to find my footing when witnessing a cycle of poverty that seemed to defy any sort of help.

~ Dee Williams

The best writers I've read possess oodles of self-doubt, yet claw their way up with each work and remain humble. Boastful ones, not so much.

~ Don Roff

If you fall down to the ground, you're in the perfect position to pray. It definitely humbles you and if you're humble it's easier for God to get Closer to You.

~ Jeanette Coron

God always gives grace to the person who knows how to humble himself before Him and who sets his hopes on Him. God only gives grace to humble people.

~ Pastor Adelaja Sunday