Quotes About Humility

Sometimes, the only option is to say you're sorry, even if you have no idea what someone is talking about.

Disciplines are small and by themselves inconsequential (like the scales that professional musicians play every day), attracting no notice and deserving no prize, humbling us in advance of the occasions when our work will be recognized and applauded. Disciplines are difficult, revealing all too clearly our laziness and foolishness, preparing us for the times when fruit seems to burst from our smallest efforts.

Over and over in the Gospels, Jesus interrupts his agenda for those who have nothing to offer him but need everything from him.

Fight like you're right, listen like you're wrong.

We're all proud of making little mistakes. It gives us the feeling we don't make any big ones.

Always keep your words soft and sweet, just in case you have to eat them.

Any admonition that declares that we must rule should be checked with the immediate reminder that Christ did not. It is the cross—not the boardroom, not the Oval Office, and not the box office—that is the absolute center of the Kingdom of God.

How we treat, talk about, respond to, and care for one another is the identifying mark of a genuine Jesus follower. Not what we believe.

So, leveraging Jesus' teaching on love, Paul gives us the grown-up version of what love really is. Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres. Love never fails. (1 CORINTHIANS 13:4 – 8)

You're worse than you thought, but God loves you more than you imagined.

Love fills the gaps. Love reduces the friction created by our limited insight, knowledge, and judgment-inhibiting experiences. There is much I don't know. There are things I'll never understand. But my ignorance does not impede my capacity to put others first.

I don't know about you, but there have been plenty of times when I have driven home from a hospital visit wondering why they let me be the pastor.

The moment we step into a ring that requires someone to lose in order for us to win, we are no longer followers of Jesus.

Knowledge alone makes Christians haughty. Application makes us holy.

Child, if such folks awe you, then picture them on the lavatory, straining, constipated. They will at once seem small, pathetic, manageable." And she whispered to me a great, universal truth: "THE BOWELS ARE GREAT LEVELLERS.

That admirable woman thought so humbly of her own potboiling that to hear it stigmatised by a critic of Stoker's mental powers as rubbishy stuff didn't depress her in the least. If she could have made it more rubbishy, and so sold more thousands of copies than she did, she would willingly have done so, but the artist in her, on whose existence George Knox and Adrian always insisted, kept her standard up, firmly if spasmodically.

It is a beautiful offering to Me when you lay down your judgement and choose compassion. When you love others the way I love you, when you hold back the consequences they could have deserved, and when you treat them the way you'd like to be treated, the you shall receive mercy as well.

I look at my feet. I hold back my tears, slump my shoulders, and retreat just enough to show deference. I have learned a lot from growing up with animals.

That, Jim Knee, is what comes from showing off," said Septimus, sounding uncannily like Marcia.

We were both dutiful, of course, my mother because she was a dutiful woman: I myself felt less humble but knew that life was only simple when one concurred with the wishes of others. In itself this is a dangerous weakness, but it seemed obligatory at the time.

It gave people the right to pity me. And in my opinion, there is nothing more degrading than pity.

It takes a fearless, unflinching love and deep humility to accept the universe as it is. The most effective way he knew to accomplish that, the most powerful tool at his disposal, was the scientific method, which over time winnows out deception. It can't give you absolute truth because science is a permanent revolution, always subject to revision, but it can give you successive approximations of reality.

What I love about science is that it demands of us a tolerance for ambiguity. It requires us to live with humility regarding our ignorance, withholding judgment until the evidence comes in. That needn't prevent us from using the little we do know to search for and decrypt new languages of reality.

True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.