Quotes About Humility

How short lived knowledge is. When I was 20 I knew it all: now at 70 I can't understand a thing

Não te irrites se te pagarem mal um benefício: antes cair das nuvens, que de um terceiro andar.

Modesty is a shining light; it prepares the mind to receive knowledge, and the heart for truth.

Much misconstruction and bitterness are spared to him who thinks naturally upon what he owes to others rather than what he ought to expect from them.

I do not know everything; still many things I understand.

In a very real sense not one of us is qualified, but it seems that God continually chooses the most unqualified to do his work, to bear his glory. If we are qualified, we tend to think that we have done the job ourselves. If we are forced to accept our evident lack of qualification, then there's no danger that we will confuse God's work with our own, or God's glory with our own.

Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

It is funny," she said, "that even after all this time, you still believe you should be rewarded, just because you have been obedient. I thought you would have learned that lesson in our father's halls. None shrank and simpered as you did, and yet great Helios stepped on you all the faster, because you were already crouched at his feet.

There was nothing clever to say, so I said something foolish.

Your wife sounds like a clever woman." "She is. I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.

For who can be ashamed to lose to such beauty?

Strange that such a small kindness felt like grace.

I never claimed to be good.

Everyone looked at me, because I was the most beautiful woman in the town. I don't say this to boast, because there is nothing in it to boast of. It was nothing I did myself.

You are a better man than I.

I brought a withered flower back to life. I banished flies from my house. I made the cherries blossom out of season and turned the fire vivid green. If Aeetes had been there, he would have choked on his beard to see such kitchen tricks. Yet because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

Among our bragging, ranting heroes, Peleus was the exception: a man of modesty.

because I knew nothing, nothing was beneath me.

I had a horror of the danger of arrogance. What a pitiful thing it is when a man lets a little temporary success spoil him, warp his judgment, and he forgets what he is!

Humility – umiltà in Italian or umirtà in Sicilian – is a word that jumps off the page. It is now considered to be the most likely origin for the word omertà. Omertà is the mafia's code of silence, and the obligation not to speak to the police that it imposes on those within its sphere of influence. Evidently omertà was originally a code of submission.

Humility is the noble choice to forgo your status, deploy your resources or use your influence for the good of others before yourself.

Humility applied to convictions does not mean believing things any less; it means treating those who hold contrary beliefs with respect and friendship.

What we suffer from today is humility in the wrong place. Modesty has moved from the organ of ambition. Modesty has settled upon the organ of conviction; where it was never meant to be. A man was meant to be doubtful about himself but undoubting about the truth. This has been exactly reversed … We are on the road to producing a race of men too mentally modest to believe in the multiplication table.5

what we don't know and can't do far exceeds what we do know and can do. A little humility, then, is hardly rocket science. It is common sense.