Quotes About Humility

Fullness of knowledge always means some understanding of the depths of our ignorance and that is always conducive to humility and reverence.

As I scrubbed the floor I was scrubbing part of the world. And I was scrubbing my mind to make it clear. It was work that made me think clear, and it was work that made me humble. I could never talk fast, and I could never say what I meant to people, or tell them what they meant to me. My tongue was loosened by my feelings. It was with my hands and with my back and shoulders that I could say how I felt. I had to talk with my arms and my strong hands.

God smiles on my ignorance.

And so, as those who have been chosen of God, holy and beloved, put on a heart of compassion, kindness, humility, gentleness and patience." (COL. 3:12)

Big egos have little ears.

Remember, there are more people in the world than yourself. Be modest! You have not yet invented nor thought anything which others have not thought or invented before. And should you really have done so, consider it a gift of heaven which you are to share with others.

How learned and fine we believed ourselves to be! How shitty of the world to deal with us this way.

You must be dumber than you think I think you are.

If a hand, a situation, a wave were ever to raise me up and carry me to where I could command power and influence, I would destroy the circumstances that had favoured me, and I would hurl myself down into the humble, speechless, insignificant darkness. I can only breathe in the lower regions.

realizing you're not king can be the first step toward getting some real power.

free will is an illusion, brought to us by evolution. All the things we are commonly blamed or praised for—ranging from murder to theft to Darwin's eminently Victorian politeness—are the result not of choices made by some immaterial "I" but of physical necessity. "This view should teach one profound humility, one deserves no credit for anything," Darwin wrote in his notes. "[N]or ought one to blame others.

If one function of low self-esteem is to keep high-status people satisfied with your deference, then its level, strictly speaking, should depend on how much deference it takes to do that; you may, in the presence of someone powerful, feel a deeper humility—about your intelligence, for example—than an objective observer would see as warranted.

I consider myself an average man except for the fact that I consider myself an average man.

Supe entonces, con humildad, con perplejidad, en un arranque de mexicanidad absoluta, que estábamos gobernados por el azar y que en esa tormenta todos nos ahogaríamos, y supe que sólo los más astutos, no yo ciertamente, iban a mantenerse a flote un poco más de tiempo.

Esta es mi última transmisión desde el planeta de los monstruos. No me sumergiré nunca más en el mar de mierda de la literatura. En adelante escribiré mis poemas con humildad y trabajaré para no morirme de hambre y no intentaré publicar.

With every day that passes I am more convinced that the act of writing is a concious act of humility.

A man ceases to be a beginner in any given science and becomes a master in that science when he has learned that he is going to be a beginner all his life.

I have never been wise.

They regarded our passage not at all, and by the afternoon I felt no more significant than an ant. I had never thought to be disdained by a tree.

Oh, and you accuse me of flattery! Here I waddle about like a fat old duck and you try to tell me I'm lovely.

I rode a horse, didn't I, when I had one? Was it because I was better than the horse that I bent it to my will? I'd used dogs to hunt for me, and hawks on occasion. What right had I to command them? There I sat, stripping the hide off a porcupine to eat it. I spoke slowly. 'Are we better than this porcupine that we are about to eat? Or is it only that we have bested it today?

Then I thought about it and wondered if I would ever reach a place in which I ceased finding out how stupid I could be.

I do not disparage any man's life. Consider my own, and tell me what height I look down from.

I perceived then that my father had already known these things, but that by asking about them in front of us, he had given Spink the opportunity to share his family's straitened circumstances without making it seem that he sought our pity.