Quotes About Humility

Lots of people don't talk about their military service.... A pretty accurate rule of thumb is the people who did the most talk about it the least. The blowhards are the ones who did squat.

He had often watched her as she crossed the floor in her checkered apron, her face a dark mask behind which belligerence battled with humility. This was in her eyes which never for an instant lost their wariness and which were always ready, within a split second, to turn black and lightless with contempt.

Be content to act, and leave the talking to others.

There is none who cannot teach somebody something, and there is none so excellent but he is excelled.

Personality cults by contemporary painters infuriate me. One must seek the opposite, fade away more every day, and find exactingness only in the act of painting, and always forget oneself.

The good we do to others is spoilt unless we efface ourselves so completely that those we help have no sense of inferiority.

We cannot measure the vast orbit of the Divine thought of which we are but an atom as small as God is great; but we can feel its vastness, we can kneel, adore, and wait.

I'd assumed that once I'd passed the age of twenty, I'd gained the power to do everything alone. But I'd been wrong about that, and this just brought it home to me, again, that I still had a long way to go.

I'd assumed that once I'd passed the age of twenty, I'd gained the power to do everything alone. But I'd been wrong about that, and this just brought it home to me, again, that I still had a long way to go. The sense of failure, however, was a strangely comfortable one-- the feeling of looking up and starting over again after pride and defensiveness had slipped away, and left me soft and crumpled on the ground.

Chinese landscape paintings often include tiny figures - as if to emphasize the grandeur of nature of which humankind is one small part. Think of the world in these terms, as larger in scale than the human. This is a healthy corrective to the commonplace view that people own the land, which exists to serve their purposes. Think big and live small.

At least one of the purposes of church is to remind us that God has other children, easily as precious as we. Baptism and narcissism cancel each other out.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet? As difficult as it is to accept, I believe that his death on the cross reveals the God who suffers for love instead of punishing the unloving, the God who lays down his life for his friends.

If Jesus meant for his followers to rule the world, then why did he teach them to wash feet?

I am not sure whether the virtue of holy envy requires holy humility or creates it, but the two are clearly related. After you have allowed the other to define herself, listening carefully to all the ways in which she is not you, it is hard to overlook the fact that you and she are made of the same basic material. You are dust, and to dust you shall return.

Yet even this turned out to be helpful, since recognizing my jerkdom is how I remember that is not who I want to be.

being ordained is not about serving God perfectly but about serving God visibly, allowing other people to learn whatever they can from watching you rise and fall. "You probably won't be much worse than other people," he said, "and you certainly won't be any better, but you will have to let people look at you. You will have to let them see you as you are.

We each have our own way of expressing ourselves. I just think that life gives us things, situations— people— to make us see how much we have to learn . . . how much we need to remember to stay humble and realize we are just like children. We don't know everything.

He said telling someone else what they're doing wrong isn't the same as being able to do it yourself.

I've seen how you can't learn anything when you're trying to look like the smartest person in the room.

In fact, we are often more interesting and sympathetic as human beings when something has gone wrong than when we are convinced of our own infallibility.

Prudence thanked him, experiencing that feeling of contrition which comes to all of us when we have made up our minds to dislike people for no apparent reason and they then perform some kind action.

Dear Mildred,' he smiled, 'you are not the kind of person to expect things as your right even though they may be.

October. She knew that she dared not pray for humility, to be granted the grace of humility, it being such a precious thing, but when others were decorating the church for Harvest Festival she chose a humble, even humiliating task, emptying the cat's tray, bundling the soiled Katlitta into a newspaper. Yet had she even chosen it – it was just something that had to be done. Whatever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might.

Pride is a thin substitute for sincere, openhearted dignity.