Humility Quotes

Radical self-denial gives the feel of adventure. If we forsake all, we even have the chance of glorious martyrdom. But in service, we must experience the many little death of going beyond ourselves. Service banishes us to the mundane, the ordinary, the trivial

~ Richard J. Foster

Integrity comes not from privilege, textbooks, or profession, but from being grounded in humility.

~ Charles F. Glassman

Look here, it's all very tidy and convenient to see the world in black and white,' said the Major, trying to soften his tone slightly. 'It's a particular passion of young men eager to sweep away their dusty elders.' He stopped to organize his thoughts into some statement short enough for a youthful attention span. 'However, philosophical rigidity is usually combined with a complete lack of education or real-world experience, and it is often augmented with strange haircuts and an aversion to bathing. Not in your case, of course—you are very neat.' Abdul Wahid looked confused, which was an improvement over the frown.'You are very strange,' he said. 'Are you saying it is wrong, stupid, to try to live a life of faith?''No, I think it is admirable,' said the Major. 'But I think a life of faith must start with remembering that humility is the first virtue before God.

~ Helen Simonson

Frasier (Responding to the suggestion that he undertake the difficult work of closure in a relationship): What you just said about my success made a lot of sense. I tuned you out after that.

~ Frasier Crane

Much of history is fragmentary and essentially anachronistic – condemning the past for not being more like the present. It has no real interest in the pastness of the past.

~ Gordon S. Wood

If Christians insist only on condemning what they don't like, they will cut themselves off from that shared cultural life.

~ Greg Foster

Academics have given up trying to recover an honest picture of the past and have decided that their history-writing should be simply an instrument of moral hand-wringing.

~ Gordon S. Wood

You hand over control, you start winning.

~ Jeff Jarvis

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

~ Doris Kearns Goodwin

I do not begin to think that I could possibly understand its inner-workings and the deepest truths of the cosmos with the 28 years that I have lived in Central New Jersey of the United States of America.

~ Chris Matakas

The complex mix of unique people rising from different identities, beliefs, education, gender, upbringing, point of views and ethnicity have unequal sense in their impact in other’s status, opportunities, resources, talents, skills and productivity. It is very good to live with cultural humility that complements competency and proficiency.” ~ an excerpt from If I Could Tell You

~ Angelica Hopes

Confession is a difficult discipline for us, because we all too often view the believing community as a fellowship of saints before we see it as a fellowship of sinners. We feel that everyone else has advanced so far into holiness that we are isolated and alone in our sin.

~ Richard J. Foster

Wisdom of the Ages: Humility If you don't have it, you're gonna get it.

~ Matthew Heines

I do so love hearing people speak passionately on any subject, other than themselves.

~ Ged Thompson Liverpool Poet

He tried juggling with raw eggs – but only once.

~ Nicholas Dawidoff

Often, your mentors are already in your life; you just haven’t yet found a way to learn from them.

~ Eric Greitens

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

~ Bill Bryson

The pride which is proud of want of pride is the most intolerable of all.

~ Marcus Aurelius

I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier. And that doesn't seem fair. I mean, I've been doing it so surely I should be getting better at it, at least a little bit blasé... And it seems to be working absolutely the opposite. This book [Big Brother] I had no confidence in the entirety of its composition, and I only decided I liked it when I finished the very final draft. This means I'm in a state of semi-misery for a long time. And I can't blithely seem either that's some little game I'm playing with myself because, you know, you can easily come along and you don't like what's you're writing for good reason. Right? So, yeah, it's very anxious making, I don't think it's so much the becoming a little more successful, I think it's becoming slightly more aware of how much has already been written, and just becoming less self-impressed as the years go by. More impressed with some people who are better than I am, but... It doesn't wow me that I can write a sentence any more. It has to be a really good sentence. And... I think that's what potentially leads to paralysis in late career, is a kind of killing humility.Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2013

~ Lionel Shriver

The author's Socrates admonishes paramount awareness human limitations. If we do good to those we evaluate as good and evil to those we evaluate at the evil, and we are wrong, we have been made the world less just.

~ Plato

People will always be tempted to wipe their feet on anything with ‘welcome’ written on it.

~ Andy Partridge

The humble woman is surprised by all the good that she sees around her rather than scandalized by what she cannot judge anyway. The humble woman is grateful for her successes but not disheartened by her failures. She enjoys her gifts and readily admits her mistakes. She maintains a sense of humor, whether the news from Wall Street is giddy or glum. She faces her character defects without getting discouraged. Her humble confidence in God’s love and her enchantment with the kabod Yahweh shape a hedge of thorns against self-absorption and frees her for an unselfconscious presence to others.

~ Brennan Manning

It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture.

~ Wendy Vanderwal-Gritter

The counselee should be aware that you are not God. Better yet, she should be aware that you are aware that you are not God.

~ James Macdonald

Being big enough to know when you are small, makes you gigantic. Lack of humility is not necessarily the down fall of great relationships, it is the slippery slide ego and pride take you down that block communication, cause mis-communication and dissolution of trust, that kill a bond.--TAMMY WOOSTER 1/15

~ Tammy Wooster

If we had not experienced our deep sinfulness and Jesus' deep forgiveness through the cross, we will not love others well in the midst of their struggles. If we do not see the beauty and glory of God in our own redemption, we will not be able to offer a compelling redemptive vision for those who are hopeless and who doubt God's love for them.

~ James Macdonald

The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own hunting shirts to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.

~ Joseph J. Ellis

A partner's different perspective is valuable, but the very fact that it is different means that it will require work, humility, time, and resources to incorporate that perspective. At times, this will require checking one's pride at the door.

~ Ron Garan

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

~ Aldo Leopold

Vision and persistence will take you to the top of the leadership mountain, but only humility will keep you there.

~ Orrin Woodward

He wrote as a young man that God's noblest gift was the gift of an inquiring mind.

~ John Adams

Quite often we are led to aporia, an impasse, unable to proceed a step further. Socrates is almost always there, but even he is only a supporting character. The starring role is given to the philosophical question. It is the philosophical question that is supposed to take center stage, cracking us open to an entirely new variety of experience.

~ Rebecca Goldstein

No reproach for a person willing to give honorable service in the passion to become wise.

~ Plato

Unlike Kim Cardassian or Donald Trump, Montaigne regarded the inward glance as an adventure in self-effacement not self infatuation. He was a charming and perceptive critic of his own foibles, especially alert to his weakness for inconsistency.

~ Danny Heitman

… the Sufi attitude is: ‘Let the real truth, whatever it may be, be revealed to me’.

~ Idries Shah

It is a sad thing to become so blinded and deafened by pride that you are no longer concerned about whether or not God is pleased with your actions.

~ Thea Harris

Rudeness, abruptness, gory tales of blood and thunder, and coarse language usually show up the greenhorn or counterfeit, and certainly the ill-bred. The bravest are the tenderest; the gentlest are the daring.

~ Kenneth W. Estes

The sciences have two extremities which meet. The first is the ignorance in which men find themselves at birth. The second is that attained by great souls. They have surveyed whatever man can know, find that they know all, meet in that same ignorance whence they started. It is a clever ignorance, which knows itself. Those among them who, having emerged from the first ignorance, have been unable to achieve the other & have some smattering of this self-satisfied knowledge, pose as experts. The latter do not disturb people, are no more mistaken in their judgments on everything than others. The masses, the skilled, make up the retinue of a nation. The others, who respect it, are equally respected by it.

~ Comte De Lautréamont

By being high, you become low and by being low, you become high. By being humble, you become high.

~ Choa Kok Sui

The immediate reactions of the two superpower leaders when confronted with the gravest international crisis of their careers were much the same, shock, wounded pride, grim determination, and barely repressed fear.

~ Michael Dobbs