Quotes about Humility

Humility is not denying your strengths. Humility is being honest about your weaknesses. All of us are a bundle of both great strengths and great weaknesses and humility is being able to be honest about both.

The number-one reason most people lose arguments is not because they're wrong; it's because they don't know when to quit.

If you should observe an occasion to give your officers and friends a little more praise than is their due, and confess more fault than you justly be charged with, you will only become the sooner for it, a great captain. Criticizing and censuring almost everyone you have to do with, will diminish friends, increase enemies, and hereby hurt you affairs.

Any man worth his salt will stick up for what he believes right, but it takes a slightly bigger man to acknowledge instantly and without reservation that he is in error.

Isn't it strange how we must surrender being right in order to find what's right, how humility enables us to be authentic, vulnerable, trustworthy, and intimate with others? People are open to those who are open to them.

Success leads to the greatest failure, which is pride. Failure leads to the greatest success, which is humility and learning.

Our goal should be to treat others better than they treat us.

Sometimes the best thing we can do for someone else is to hold our tongue. When tempted to give advice that's not wanted, to show off, to say "I told you so," or to point out another's error, the best policy is to say nothing. As nineteenth-century British journalist George Sala advised, we should strive "not only to say the right thing in the right place, but far more difficult, to leave unsaid the wrong thing at the tempting moment.

Be happy when you are blamed and accused wrongly, for then you have the chance to see all the bitter, hostile or self-pitying responses that your sinful soul wants to spew out, as if these puny things could in any way defend you! Watch and see if any of these poisons come out of you when your spirit is pricked by an accusation. Only then can you see yourself as you are, and confess thy sin that is within you and forsake yourself again into the Lords care.

It behooves us, then, to humble ourselves before the Offended power, to confess our national sins, and pray for clemency and forgiveness.

Not all of us can do great things. But we can do small things with great love.

I find relief from the questions only when I concede that I am not obliged to know everything. I remind myself it is sufficient to know what I know, and that what I know, may not always be true.