Quotes About Humility

We must be honest and humble about this: Many people of other faiths, like Sufi masters, Jewish prophets, many philosophers, and Hindu mystics, have lived in light of the Divine encounter better than many Christians. And why would a God worthy of the name God not care about all of the children?

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Jesus is never upset with sinners. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.

All we can do is keep our egos out of the way, note and weep over our defensive behaviors, keep our various centers from closing down—and the Presence that is surely the Highest Power is then obvious, all-embracing, and immediately effective. The immediate embrace is from God's side.

That is all I ever need to remember on any given day, the ultimate condensation of the first three steps, or the Three Step Waltz, as we call it: I can't; God can; I think I'll let God. I am powerless over people, places, and things, unable to save or fix or rescue anyone, including myself. But God can, through the movement of grace in our lives: grace as

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. 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 the earnest will find it.

unlearning, letting go, surrendering, serving others, and not the language of self-development—which often lurks behind our popular notions of "salvation.

The only people that Jesus seemed to exclude were precisely those who refused to know they were ordinary sinners like everyone else. The only thing he excluded was exclusion itself.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

If you want to be important, serve others. And if you want to be at the top, then slave to help everyone else. The

Two thousand years after Jesus lived here, Christians still have a hard time accepting his upside-down world, in which we are expected to work for justice on behalf of others but not to demand or expect it for ourselves (Matthew 5:6,10-12). This is one of the hardest challenges of Jesus' message. It demands an expanded heart and mind.

ALL SAYING MUST BE BALANCED BY UNSAYING, and knowing must be humbled by unknowing. Without this balance, religion invariably becomes arrogant, exclusionary, and even violent.

It takes uncommon humility to carry both the dark and the light side of things. The only true perfection available to humans is the honest acceptance of our imperfection.

pride. If there's too much "I know," it will lead to illusion and ignorance. Isn't that ironic? Jesus says, "The person who says 'I know,' is precisely the blind one" (John 9:41).

he just tells him to "descend" from his power position, "go away and get rid of all your possessions." Money is only the metaphor here; the real possession he has to get rid of is his ego.

Thérèse, almost counter to reason, says: "Whoever is willing to serenely bear the trial of being displeasing to herself, that person is a pleasant place of shelter for Jesus.

The path to Christian perfection always runs across the collapse of our own moral efforts and self-established ideals.

Live simply so that others may simply live.

Maybe, like children, we assume ourselves to be of central importance, and we're not. Maybe the inequities that consume us here on earth aren't really the issue.

What do the Scriptures speak but Christ's love and tender care over those that are humbled?

Sometimes I imagine I can feel the earth pause in its rotation, can feel it pause and look at us as if wondering, Just who the hell do you think you are?

To claim the mantle of purity is always a risky business. It just gives an excuse to be disillusioned once your ordinary humidity is exposed.