Quotes about Humility

You are supposed to struggle with spiritual texts, but when you make the Bible into a quick answer book, you largely remain at your present level of awareness. There are groups who would describe the Bible as an answer book for all of life's problems. The Bible is actually a conflict book. It is filled with seeming contradictions or paradoxes and, if you read it honestly and humbly, it should actually create problems for you!

How do you sell emptiness, vulnerability, and nonsuccess?

Jesus is never upset with sinners. He is only upset with people who do not think they are sinners.

It is the primary form of "dying to the self" that Jesus lived personally and the Buddha taught experientially. The growing consensus is that, whatever you call it, such calm, egoless seeing is invariably characteristic of people at the highest levels of doing and loving in all cultures and religions.

That is all I ever need to remember on any given day, the ultimate condensation of the first three steps, or the Three Step Waltz, as we call it: I can't; God can; I think I'll let God. I am powerless over people, places, and things, unable to save or fix or rescue anyone, including myself. But God can, through the movement of grace in our lives: grace as

We grow spiritually much more by doing it wrong than by doing it right. That just might be the central message of how spiritual growth happens, yet nothing in us wants to believe it. If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own. What a clever place for God to hide holiness so that only the humble and the earnest will find it.

When people get together in solidarity and unity, not out of power but out of powerlessness, then Christ is in their midst.

you learn how to recover from falling by falling! It is precisely by falling off the bike many times that you eventually learn what the balance feels like. The skater pushing both right and left eventually goes where he or she wants to go. People who have never allowed themselves to fall are actually off balance, while not realizing it at all. That is why they are so hard to live with.

Shadow work is humiliating work, but properly so. If you do not eat such humiliations with regularity and make friends with … all those who reveal to you and convict you of your own denied faults…, you will certainly remain in the first half of life forever.

In this negative frame, the quickest ticket to heaven, enlightenment, or salvation is "unworthiness" itself, or at least a willingness to face our own smallness and incapacity.

What, then, does it mean to follow Jesus? I believe that we are invited to gaze upon the image of the crucified Jesus to soften our hearts toward all suffering, to help us see how we ourselves have been "bitten" by hatred and violence, and to know that God's heart has always been softened toward us.

If you want to be important, serve others. And if you want to be at the top, then slave to help everyone else. The