Quotes About Humility

The spirit of deception, you see," Father Maximos explained, "has egotism and pride as its primary attribute.

There are some lives He brings into this world neither to do great work nor to bear great burdens.

Familiarity with any great thing removes our awe of it. The great general is only terrible to the enemy; the great poet is frequently scolded by his wife; the children of the great statesman clamber about his knees with perfect trust and impunity; the great actor who is called before the curtain by admiring audiences is often waylaid at the stage door by his creditors.

As a matter of fact, we are none of us above criticism; so let us bear with each other's faults.

The serious writer must take serious vows....a vow of silence, except through his work. A vow of consistency, sticking with writing to the exclusion of other fields. A vow of ego-chastity, abstaining from adulation. A vow of self-regard, placing the self as writer before the self as personality.

The true good deeds are performed in silence.

I used my brains to outsmart teachers—and that wasn't very smart at all.

I should not have cared to see it as an act of self-sacrifice even if it had been one; for there is nothing clever in self-sacrifice, nothing to pride oneself on.

False modesty is the last refinement of vanity.

The same amount of pride which makes a man treat haughtily his inferiors, makes him cringe servilely; to those above him.

We must oblige everybody as much as we can; we have often need of assistance from those inferior to ourselves.

Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.

No people are more often wrong than those who will not allow themselves to be wrong.

If we had no faults ourselves, we should not take such pleasure in observing those of others.

We confess small faults to insinuate that we have no great ones.

The man who lives free from folly is not so wise as he thinks.

The surest way to be deceived is to think oneself cleverer than the others.

Not all who discharge their debts of gratitude should flatter themselves that they are grateful.

'Tis a sort of coquetry to boast that we never coquet.

Only yesterday I was full of worldly fancies, although religion had already some share in my thoughts: glory was still my daydream. Today my hopes are higher, and I covet here below nothing but obscurity and peace.

Real excellence and humility are not incompatible one with the other, on the contrary they are twin sisters.

Knowing too much is very apt to make us troublesome to other people

The clay pot wishes to laugh at the iron pot. --Trinidad proverb

As to having a preference, that was new too. You take what you're given and you're grateful for it. Once that message is well and truly ingrained in you, it feels like vainglory to imagine one's own likes and dislikes could matter to other people.