Quotes About Humility

Controlling people try to control people, and they do the same with God—but loving anything always means a certain giving up of control. You tend to create a God who is just like you—whereas it was supposed to be the other way around.

The great and merciful surprise is that we come to God not by doing it right but by doing it wrong!

Right words make all of us feel falsely important. Right action keeps all of us forever beginners.

Sell your cleverness and purchase bewilderment instead. It is such a willingness to live with bewilderment that characterizes the true wise man.

All we can give back and all God wants from any of us is to humbly and proudly return the product that we have been given—which is ourselves!

And we must—absolutely must—maintain a fundamental humility before the Great Mystery. If we do not, religion always worships itself and its formulations and never God.

St. Bonaventure (1221–1274) taught that to work up to loving God, start by loving the very humblest and simplest things, and then move up from there.

If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness, so that only the humble and earnest will find it! A "perfect" person ends up being one who can consciously forgive and include imperfection rather than one who thinks he or she is totally above and beyond imperfection.

the Eucharistic bread and wine are not a prize for the perfect or a reward for good behavior. Rather they are food for the human journey and medicine for the sick. We come forward not because we are worthy but because we are all wounded and somehow "unworthy.

Once you see that your skin and your gift are two sides of the same coin, you can never forget it. It preserves religion from any arrogance and denial.

If we try to change our ego with the help of our ego, we only have a better-disguised ego!

We've turned faith into a right to certitude when, in fact, this Trinitarian mystery is whispering quite the opposite: we have to live in exquisite, terrible humility before reality.

There are three primary things that we have to let go of. First is the compulsion to be successful. Second is the compulsion to be right—even, and especially, to be theologically right…. Finally there is the compulsion to be powerful, to have everything under control. I

Think of the cold Grand Inquisitor in The Brothers Karamazov, or the monk who tries to eliminate all humor in The Name of the Rose, or the frowning Koran burners of Florida. Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

Did you ever notice that Jesus himself was not really that upset at the bad behavior that most of us call sin? Instead, he directed his critical attention toward people who did not think they were sinners, who could not see their own shadows or dark sides, or acknowledge their complicity in the world's domination systems.

Life is not about me; it is about God, and God is about love. When we don't know love, when we don't experience love, when we experience only the insecurity and fragility of the small self, we become restless.

The most courageous thing we will ever do is to bear humbly the mystery of our own reality.

Loving God, allow me to be a sheep at least once in a while, and never let me forget that most of my life I have been a goat."       Tuesday

Holier-than-thou people usually end up holier than nobody.

I hope we can inaugurate a new humility in our use of religious language, which for me is the very proof that it is authentic.

Responding to John the Baptist's hard-line approach, Jesus maintains both sides of this equation when he says, "No man born of woman is greater than John the Baptizer, yet the least who enters the kingdom of heaven is greater than he is" (Matthew 11:11). Is that double-talk? No, it is second-half-of-life talk.

Genuine humility is based on a realistic self-appraisal and a healthy feeling of self-worth.

It is the egoic illusion of our own perfect rightness that often allows us to crucify others.

often the rich, the religious, and the self-sufficient know nothing about self-surrender. Jesus