Best 2588 quotes in «humility quotes» category

I keep a vivid memory of failure in my back pocket, so no matter how much I accomplish I stay grounded.

I know I have this judgmental side that I'm often fighting against. But today I recognized the depths of my assumptions about people. What I envision is nothing remotely similar to the reality. Humility hurts. Coming home is disturbing.

I know the meaning of humility. It is not self-disparagement. It is the motive power of action. If, intending to absolve myself, I plead fate as the excuse for my misfortunes, I subject myself to fate. If I plead treason as their excuse, I subject myself to treason. But if I accept responsibility, I affirm my strength as a man. I am able to influence that of which I form part. I declare myself a constituent part of the community of mankind.

I learned that it is better, a thousand-fold, for a proud man to fall and be humbled, than to hold up his head in his pride and fancied innocence. I learned that he that will be a hero, will barely be a man; that he that will be nothing but a doer of his work, is sure of his manhood. In nothing was my ideal lowered, or dimmed, or grown less precious; I only saw it too plainly, to set myself for a moment beside it. Indeed, my ideal soon became my life; whereas, formerly, my life had consisted in a vain attempt to behold, if not my ideal in myself, at least myself in my ideal.

I laboured hard at my book, without allowing it to interfere with the punctual discharge of my newspaper duties; and it came out and was very successful. I was not stunned by the praise which sounded in my ears, notwithstanding that I was keenly alive to it, and thought better of my own performance, I have little doubt, than anybody else did. It has always been in my observation of human nature, that a man who has any good reason to believe in himself never flourishes himself before the faces of other people in order that they may believe in him. For this reason, I retained my modesty in very self-respect; and the more praise I got, the more I tried to deserve.

I liken modern scientists to conquistadors. They have no idea what they're dealing with, but they're going to conquer it, whatever it is --- all in the name of God. Now, don't get me wrong, I'm not opposed to scientific discovery and exploration. I love this stuff. What I despise is reckless disregard for how little we know. We create trans fats with nary a question about whether they're good for us or not. We develop a food pyramid with carbohydrates on the bottom and thirty years later we realize it created an obesity and type 2 diabetes epidemic. It should give us all pause that we would be a much healthier nation if the government had never told us how to eat.

I like to introduce myself, because THEN I can get in all the facts." The usually self-deprecating John Hay on the ironic formality of signing his own commission as Secretary of State.

I’ll always be a student, because I think of music as never ending.

I love the vastness of the ocean. I love its serenity, tranquility, humility, and purifying power.

I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please. "The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere. "I'm working on it.

I'm a weak man, Navani. I really am. If I give myself a few feet of leeway, I burst through all of my prohibitions.

I mean it takes a certain kind of maturity to live in the South these days. You don't have it yet, but you have a shadow of the beginnings of it. You haven't the humbleness of mind-" "I thought the fear of the Lord was the beginning of wisdom." "It's the same thing. Humility.

I might paraphrase Churchill and say: never have I received so much for so little. [Exemplifying humility, upon accepting the Nobel Prize in Chemistry.]

Imitate Jesus and Socrates

I'm more human now. It's the God in people that connects them to me.– Ali

In a world full of cynics, critics, and competitors, we get to choose instead to be cheerleaders for others.

In a press interview at the time, Gable said, “My days of playing the dashing lover are over. I’m no longer believable in those parts. There has been considerable talk about older guys wooing and winning leading ladies half their age. I don’t think the public likes it, and I don’t care for it myself. It’s not realistic. Actresses that I started out with like Joan Crawford and Barbara Stanwyck have long since quit playing glamour girls and sweet young things. Now it’s time I acted my age. “Let’s be honest,” he continued. “It’s a character role, and I’ll be playing more of them. There’s a risk involved, of course. I have no idea if I can attain the success as a character actor as I did playing the dashing young lover, but it’s a chance I have to take. Not everybody is able to do it.

In brokenness comes beauty, divine fragility.

Indiscretion is weighted heavily towards youth; inaction is weighted heavily towards old age.

Ingratitude produces pride while gratitude produces humility.

In front of an audience of Protestant clergy, the Catholic JFK "was drawing strength from his vulnerability.

Inferno was for learning about the nature of our sins. Purgatorio is for learning how to overcome our tendencies to fall victim to them. Understanding our dilemma is important, but it's not enough. What we do with that understanding makes the difference between life and death. Humility is the foundation of all spiritual progress. Humility builds resilience. Stop thinking of yourself as the center of your world you will find it becomes easier to endure life's setbacks. Plus, you will in time become more grateful, more merciful, and more loving.

In great humility, we find our strength.

In learning from failure, there are stepping stones for success.

In humility, we find our true calling and our greatest honor.

In most of the Western world, where Christianity still enjoys a significant amount of privilege, especially when practiced by middle-class, white Christians, Jesus is seen as the heroic figure, the ultimate example of godliness, holiness, mercy, compassion, and justice—as well he should! He is God-made-flesh, after all. However, given that, when we identify with Jesus in the act of foot washing where we take the role of Jesus, all too often we are unconsciously (though sometimes all too consciously) assuming those characteristics onto ourselves. In trying to be Jesus to others, we can assume a posture of spiritual superiority and/or paternalism. The recipients of our service, “the least of these”, are then seen as the needy recipients of our goodness. Again, while affirming the value in such acts of humble service, too often miss how such posturing fails to recognize the radical presence of Christ as “the least of these”.

In order to see the world in a true light and everything in its proper shape, in order to contemplate the wide horizon, we must climb out of the pit of self-centeredness and rise to a height. We must see the center of being not in ourselves but in God, where it truly is, and then everything will fall into the right place. Humility in its ontological meaning is the heroic conquest of selfhood and ascent to the heights of theocentrism.

In my own book-signings, I find humility. It’s always humbling when people go out of their way to come visit with me and by some of my books.

In other words, we are only proud of being more successful, more intelligent or more good-looking than the next person, and we are in the presence of someone who is more successful, intelligent and good-looking than we are, we lose all pleasure in what we had. That is because we really had no pleasure in it. We were proud of it.

In our moments in the sun beware of casting dark shadows.

In order to free ourselves from our assumptions about love, we must ask ourselves what long-held, often buried assumptions are and then face them, which takes courage, humility, and kindness.

In reverent pauses, when we slow down and think about the gift of life, we may briefly touch humility.

In the ancient world, this was understood by the Christians, our only (if very imperfect) predecessors: Humility is a virtue, pride a vice; We comes from God, I from the Devil.

Instead of finding identity in our roles—in being fathers and mothers, teachers and writers and pastors—we must find identity in being image bearers of God.

In the context of today, this WAS heroism.

In the Christic tradition, this is the meaning of  'becoming as a little child.'  Little children don't think they know what things mean, in fact, they know they don't know.  They ask someone older and wiser to explain things to them.  We're like children who don't know but think we do.  We're meant to shine.  Look at small children.  They're all so unique before they start trying to be, because they demonstrate the power of genuine humility.  This is also the explanation of 'beginner's luck.' When we go into a situation not knowing the rules, we don't pretend to know how to figure anything out, and we don't know yet what there is to be afraid of.  This releases the mind to create from its own higher power."

In the Upper Room and on Calvary's hill, Jesus teaches us that the most important aspects of a well-lived life are love, humility and obedience.

In the forty minutes I watched the muskrat, he never saw me, smelled me, or heard me at all. When he was in full view of course I never moved except to breathe. My eyes would move, too, following his, but he never noticed. Only once, when he was feeding from the opposite bank about eight feet away did he suddenly rise upright, all alert- and then he immediately resumed foraging. But he never knew I was there. I never knew I was there, either. For that forty minutes last night I was as purely sensitive and mute as a photographic plate; I received impressions, but I did not print out captions. My own self-awareness had disappeared; it seems now almost as though, had I been wired to electrodes, my EEG would have been flat. I have done this sort of thing so often that I have lost self-consciousness about moving slowly and halting suddenly. And I have often noticed that even a few minutes of this self-forgetfulness is tremendously invigorating. I wonder if we do not waste most of our energy just by spending every waking minute saying hello to ourselves. Martin Buber quotes an old Hasid master who said, “When you walk across the field with your mind pure and holy, then from all the stones, and all growing things, and all animals, the sparks of their souls come out and cling to you, and then they are purified and become a holy fire in you.

In the name of "force protection," the military often rolls up windows, builds walls, and points rifles at the outside world. The best force protection, however, is to be surrounded by friends and allies.

I often think we should have tattooed on the back of whatever hand we use to shoot or write, 'I might be wrong.

I overreacted to praise, signing an autograph. I'd write a check to buy it back.

I rather choose to go through what will make me humble than to go for what will increase my pride to a level without limit

I read them (articles TR wrote on his honeymoon) all over to Edith and her corrections and help were most valuable to me.

I respect the decision of others.

I regard myself as the most wretched of all men, stinking and covered with sores, and as one who has committed all sorts of crimes against his King. Overcome by remorse, I confess all my wickedness to Him, ask His pardon and abandon myself entirely to Him to do with as He will. But this King, filled with goodness and mercy, far from chastising me, lovingly embraces me, makes me eat at His table, serves me with His own hands, gives me the keys of His treasures and treats me as His favorite. He talks with me and is delighted with me in a thousand and one ways; He forgives me and relieves me of my principle bad habits without talking about them; I beg Him to make me according to His heart and always the more weak and despicable I see myself to be, the more beloved I am of God.

I sometimes wonder whether the act of surrender is not one of the greatest of all - the highest. It is one of the [most] difficult of all... You see it's so immensely complicated. It needs real humility and at the same time, an absolute belief in one's own essential freedom. It is an act of faith. At the last moments, like all great acts, it is pure risk. This is true for me as a human being and as a writer. Dear Heaven, how hard it is to let go - to step into the blue. And yet one's creative life depends on it and one desires to do nothing else.

I should wish to see them very good friends, and would, on no account, authorize in my girls the smallest degree of arrogance towards their relations; but still they cannot be equals.” (10)

I suppose the stern and the cruel ones rule the world. If so, I shall be content to try to live each day within the limits of my conscience and let great plaudits go to those who are willing to pay the price for it.

I still get plenty anxious. The weird thing, and the unpleasant surprise for me, of proceeding well into the middle, perhaps even post-prime of my career is that writing books has not got any easier. And that doesn't seem fair. I mean, I've been doing it so surely I should be getting better at it, at least a little bit blasé... And it seems to be working absolutely the opposite. This book [Big Brother] I had no confidence in the entirety of its composition, and I only decided I liked it when I finished the very final draft. This means I'm in a state of semi-misery for a long time. And I can't blithely seem either that's some little game I'm playing with myself because, you know, you can easily come along and you don't like what's you're writing for good reason. Right? So, yeah, it's very anxious making, I don't think it's so much the becoming a little more successful, I think it's becoming slightly more aware of how much has already been written, and just becoming less self-impressed as the years go by. More impressed with some people who are better than I am, but... It doesn't wow me that I can write a sentence any more. It has to be a really good sentence. And... I think that's what potentially leads to paralysis in late career, is a kind of killing humility. Politics & Prose Bookstore in Washington, DC, on June 11, 2013

It can be unhelpful to wax eloquent about the inerrancy of Scripture without an accompanying acknowledgment that, while Scripture may be inerrant, there are no inerrant interpreters of Scripture.