Quotes About Humility

Even though most people coming to a church for the first time cannot articulate this verse, they are probably thinking something similar to what James and John said to Jesus, "Then James and John, the sons of Zebedee, came to him. 'Teacher, ' they said, 'we want you to do for us whatever we ask'" (Mark 10:35 NIV, emphasis added). Each week people show up telling the church, many times, "We want you to do for us whatever we ask.

Just because you love the mountains doesn't mean the mountains love you.

understanding of God's will starts with surrender of our wills to Him and with charitable, loving acts of service to others. We cannot live unto ourselves alone.

We must acquire honesty, humility, appreciation, and kill self-centeredness to keep sober.

For until ye are willing to lose thyself in service, ye may not indeed know that peace which He has promised to give--to all.

Because of the difficulty and complexity of the problems, and because the client's own view of what is going on is so important in the relationship, this also requires a great deal of humility in the consultant.

can leaders and managers learn to be humble consultants to their subordinates?

Leadership in this environment is categorically humbling because it is virtually impossible for an individual to accumulate enough knowledge to figure out all of the answers. Interdependence and constant change become a way of life in which humility in the face of this complexity has become a critical survival skill.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships.

The Humble Inquiry attitude does not require that humility be a major personality trait of a good inquirer. But even the most confident or arrogant among us will find ourselves humbled by the reality of being dependent on others, and by the sheer complexity of trying to figure out what is important and what is not. We can think of this as Here-and-now Humility, accepting our dependence on each for information sharing and task completion.

If you are trying to develop a good relationship and feel the conversation starting to go in the wrong direction, you can humbly ask some version of "Are we OK?" "Is this working?" or "What is happening here?" to explore what might be going wrong and how it might be improved.

This may seem like a harsh view of our culture, and there are certainly trends in other directions, but when we deal with culture at the tacit assumption level we have to think clearly about what our assumptions actually are, quite apart from our espoused values. The result of a pragmatic, individualistic, competitive, task-oriented culture is that humility is low on the value scale.

The world is becoming more technologically complex, interdependent, and culturally diverse, which makes the building of relationships more and more necessary to get things accomplished and, at the same time, more difficult. Relationships are the key to good communication; good communication is the key to successful task accomplishment; and Humble Inquiry, based on Here-and-now Humility, is the key to good relationships. Increasingly

another person in that moment. My Here-and-now Humility can by itself trigger a very positive and genuine curiosity and interest in you. You will feel acknowledged, and it is precisely my temporary "subordination" that can create psychological safety for you, which can increase the chances that you will reveal what I need to know to get a task completed and begin to build our relationship constructively.

Telling is only an investment if you know for sure that what you are telling is of value to the other person. That is why it is safest to tell only if you have been asked, rather than arrogantly deciding on your own to tell somebody something.

Telling puts the other person down. It implies that the other person does not already know what I am telling and that the other person ought to know it.

Gratuitous telling betrays three kinds of arrogance: (1) that you think you know more than the person you're telling, (2) that your knowledge is the correct knowledge, and (3) that you have the right to structure other people's experience for them.

My name used to be in the papers daily As having dined somewhere, Or traveled somewhere, Or rented a house in Paris, Where I entertained the nobility. I was forever eating or traveling, Or taking the cure at Baden-Baden. Now I am here to do honor To Spoon River, here beside the family whence I sprang. No one cares now where I dined, Or lived, or whom I entertained, Or how often I took the cure at Baden-Baden!

And then I knew I was one of Life's fools, Whom only death would treat as the equal Of other men

You are here for but an instant, and you mustn't take yourself too seriously

There are few efforts more conducive to humility than that of the translator trying to communicate an incommunicable beauty. Yet, unless we do try, something unique and never surpassed will cease to exist except in the libraries of a few inquisitive book lovers.

True humility--the basis of the Christian system--is the low but deep and firm foundation of all virtues.

The arrogance of age must submit to be taught by youth.

I have never yet seen any plan which has not been mended by the observations of those who were much inferior in understanding to the person who took the lead in the business.