Quotes about Humility

One reason why we are less fervent than we ought to be is that we cripple our own spirit by taking ourselves too seriously. We expect too much from ourselves when we ought to expect everything from God on Whom we utterly depend.

Actually I feel more sure than I ever have in my life that I am obeying the Lord and am on the way He wills for me, though at the same time I am struck and appalled (more than ever!) by the shoddiness of my response.

It takes heroic charity and humility to let others sustain us when we are absolutely incapable of sustaining ourselves.

Nor do I really know myself, and the fact that I think I am following your will does not mean that I am actuallly doing so. But I believe that the desire to please you does in fact please you.

genuine strength arises only in a condition of vulnerability. The flagrant display and self-serving use of power are an admission of deep incapacity.

It is not humility to insist on being someone that you are not. It is as much as saying that you know better than God who you are and who you ought to be. How do you expect to arrive at the end of your own journey if you take the road to another mans city? How do you expect to reach your own perfection by leading somebody else's life?

When it comes to the nitty-gritty, what ties these threads of biblical narrative together into a revelation of God's love is that God has commanded us to refrain from grumbling about the dailiness of life. Instead we are meant to accept it as a reality that humbles us even as it gives cause for praise. The rhythm of sunrise and sunset marks a passage of time that marks each day rich with the possibility of salvation.

To eat in a monastery refectory is an exercise in humility; daily, one is reminded to put communal necessity before individual preference. While consumer culture speaks only to preferences, treating even whims as needs to be granted (and the sooner the better), monastics sense that this pandering to delusions of self-importance weakens the true self, and diminishes our ability to distinguish desires from needs. It's a price they're not willing to pay.

A man who truly knows himself realizes his own worthlessness, and takes no pleasure in the praises of men.

As long as you are proud you cannot know God. A proud man is always looking down on thing and people: and, of course, as long as you are looking down you cannot see something that is above you.

A proud man is always looking down on things and people; and, of course, as long as you are looking down, you cannot see something that is above you.

Pride gets no pleasure out of having something, only out of having more of it than the next man... It is the comparison that makes you proud: the pleasure of being above the rest. Once the element of competition is gone, pride is gone.