Best 2588 quotes in «humility quotes» category

Ability to laugh at evil, to relativize symbols without dismissing them is usually a sign of a rather healthy person. Puritans and reformers can never laugh.

A blush of breeze rose from the grass. Jacob felt as if an angel's wing had beat against his cheek. He touched his cheek slowly. He felt embarrassed by the thought. "That I should think an angel came to me." He wept. And, again, the brush of breeze against his cheek.

A broken soul is like an alabaster box that contains expensive perfume. God recognizes its sweet aroma, our personal composition of failure and frustration, through which He chooses to teach us humility, patience, and hope.

Absolute humility [param vinaya] is a part of pragna [the power of the soul and soul’s representative]. Absolute humility should be maintained till complete God realization [Bhagwan no dhatu milap] occurs.

Accepting help shames only the arrogant.

A candle cannot boast standing next to the sun.

... according to a famous study by the influential management theorist Jim Collins, many of the best performing companies of the late twentieth century were run by what he calls "Level 5 Leaders." These exceptional CEOs were known not for their flash or charisma but for extreme humility coupled with intense professional will.

A Christian reveals true humility by showing the gentleness of Christ, by being always ready to help others, by speaking kind words and performing unselfish acts, which elevate and ennoble the most sacred message that has come to the world.

A commander's pride got his soldiers dead.

A computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things.

A confused and weak man hides his weakness and uncertainty with fiery speeches.

A couple of weeks ago I received a phone call form a young woman who inquired as to how she might obtain a copy of In Memory Yet Green (the first volume of my autobiography)... There seemed no point in suggesting that she haunt the second bookstores because no one but an idiot ever abandons one of my books after it has come in his possession, and there are few idiots who know enough to buy one of my books in the first place.

A culture capable of imagining complexly is a humble culture. It acts, when it has to act, as late in the game as possibl, and as cautiously, because it knows its girth and the tight confines of the china shop it's blundering into. And it knows that no matter how well prepared it is -- no matter how ruthlessly it has held its projections up to intelligent scrutiny -- the place it is headed for is going to very different from the place it imagined. The shortfall between the imagined and the real, multiplied by the violence of one's intent, equals the evil one will do.

Active listening is being humble and hunting and searching for the best idea possible.

A dead end is only the end of your road if you fail to turn around. Too many people needlessly waste time and energy trying to find a way across a dead end street. Stop, turn around, and ask God for directions to get to where you were going in the first place. Recalculate!

Advice saves you time. If you ask anyone over fifty, which is more important, time or money, they will ALWAYS tell you time.

A farmer, as one of his farmer correspondents once wrote to Liberty Hyde Bailey, is "a dispenser of the 'Mysteries of God.'" The husband, unlike the "manager" or the would-be objective scientist, belongs inherently to the complexity and the mystery that is to be husbanded, and so the husbanding mind is both careful and humble.

A flower does not use words to announce its arrival to the world; it just blooms.

After Galileo, Einstein and even Freud, we try to hang onto a pathetic sort of significance on this planet and in this universe, that we are in some way more special than anything else. Our supreme arrogance that in some way the world was created for us has neither scientific nor spiritual reality.

After the original rapture of conversion had settled in, (Bob) Dylan backed away from his obviously Christian lyrics and returned to his more metaphorical use of language.

Against Hume, Kant has found a more proper ground for humility: “True humility follows unavoidably from our sincere and exact comparison of ourselves with the moral law” . The proper way to come to terms with our limits is not to compare ourselves with others but to hold ourselves accountable to those rational moral standards we know to be most properly our own.

A grateful mind by owing owes not, but still pays, at once indebted and discharged; what burden then?

A good therapy helps you develop a sense of irony about your life so that when you start to repeat old and unhelpful patterns, something within you says, "There you go again; let's call this to a halt. You can do something different." Often the first step toward doing something different is developing the capacity to not act, to stay still and reflect.

A high school student wrote to ask, "What was the greatest event in American history?" I can't say. However, I suspect that like so many "great" events, it was something very simple and very quiet with little or no fanfare (such as someone forgiving someone else for a deep hurt that eventually changed the course of history). The really important "great" things are never center stage of life's dramas; they're always "in the wings". That's why it's so essential for us to be mindful of the humble and the deep rather than the flashy and the superficial.

A humble man speaks not of his own humility

A humble person is comfortable in their own skin.

A humble sinner is better than a proud saint.

A humble sinner is more justified than a proud saint.

A humble student is better than a proud scholar.

A humble prisoner is more righteous than an arrogant judge.

A humble student is better than a proud teacher.

A humble coward is better than a proud warrior.

A humble sage is better than a proud scholar.

A kind of northing is what I wish to accomplish, a single-minded trek towards that place where any shutter left open to the zenith at night will record the wheeling of all the sky’s stars as a pattern of perfect, concentric circles. I seek a reduction, a shedding, a sloughing off. At the seashore you often see a shell, or fragment of a shell, that sharp sands and surf have thinned to a wisp. There is no way you can tell what kind of shell it had been, what creature it had housed; it could have been a whelk or a scallop, a cowrie, limpet, or conch. The animal is long since dissolved, and its blood spread and thinned in the general sea. All you hold in your hand is a cool shred of shell, an inch long, pared so thin that it passes a faint pink light. It is an essence, a smooth condensation of the air, a curve. I long for the North where unimpeded winds would hone me to such a pure slip of bone. But I’ll not go northing this year. I’ll stalk that floating pole and frigid air by waiting here. I wait on bridges; I wait, struck, on forest paths and meadow’s fringes, hilltops and banksides, day in and day out, and I receive a southing as a gift. The North washes down the mountains like a waterfall, like a tidal wave, and pours across the valley; it comes to me. It sweetens the persimmons and numbs the last of the crickets and hornets; it fans the flames of the forest maples, bows the meadow’s seeded grasses and pokes it chilling fingers under the leaf litter, thrusting the springtails and the earthworms deeper into the earth. The sun heaves to the south by day, and at night wild Orion emerges looming like the Specter over Dead Man Mountain. Something is already here, and more is coming.

Alas! in the clothes of the greatest potentate, what is there but a man?

Alas! it is but little we have done for our Master's glory. Our winter has lasted all too long. We are as cold as ice when we should feel a summer's glow and bloom with sacred flowers.

A lawyer's empathy for her client deepens when she realizes that she has only seen the last couple of phases of his decline. How hard it must his initial adjustment have been to his loss of freedom?

Albeit i may die sleep not in the coffen of gold and even beer no fruit; but my impact after depart is my particular to paradise.

Alex Rodriguez seemed not to fit in with the rest of his Yankee teammates. For instance, he wanted a clubhouse attendant personally assigned to him, when there were four or five for the whole team. Seeing the rift between him and the rest of the team and how Rodriguez's major focus on how HE was perceived, Joe Torre suggested in the individual meeting that Rodriguez at least get his own coffee rather than send someone to get it for him. Later that day, Alex Rodriguez made a point of telling the manager that he got his own coffee – drawing attention to himself, even in what was meant to be just an example of how he could fit in with normal behavior.

Alexier found that a dose of humility did wonders to one’s ability to grasp new ideas and, after all, it had been this very ability that made him the researcher he was today.

All at once, something wonderful happened, although at first, it seemed perfectly ordinary. A female goldfinch suddenly hove into view. She lighted weightlessly on the head of a bankside purple thistle and began emptying the seedcase, sowing the air with down. The lighted frame of my window filled. The down rose and spread in all directions, wafting over the dam’s waterfall and wavering between the tulip trunks and into the meadow. It vaulted towards the orchard in a puff; it hovered over the ripening pawpaw fruit and staggered up the steep faced terrace. It jerked, floated, rolled, veered, swayed. The thistle down faltered down toward the cottage and gusted clear to the woods; it rose and entered the shaggy arms of pecans. At last it strayed like snow, blind and sweet, into the pool of the creek upstream, and into the race of the creek over rocks down. It shuddered onto the tips of growing grasses, where it poised, light, still wracked by errant quivers. I was holding my breath. Is this where we live, I thought, in this place in this moment, with the air so light and wild? The same fixity that collapses stars and drives the mantis to devour her mate eased these creatures together before my eyes: the thick adept bill of the goldfinch, and the feathery coded down. How could anything be amiss? If I myself were lighter and frayed, I could ride these small winds, too, taking my chances, for the pleasure of being so purely played. The thistle is part of Adam’s curse. “Cursed is the ground for thy sake, in sorrow shalt thou eat of it; thorns also and thistles shall it bring forth to thee.” A terrible curse: But does the goldfinch eat thorny sorrow with the thistle or do I? If this furling air is fallen, then the fall was happy indeed. If this creekside garden is sorrow, then I seek martyrdom. I was weightless; my bones were taut skins blown with buoyant gas; it seemed that if I inhaled too deeply, my shoulders and head would waft off. Alleluia.

All of yesterday's ballers are today's road sweepers.

...all of us are somewhere on a journey to God, and the gap between least and most advanced is infinitely smaller than the gap between the most advanced and God himself.

all ought to be common among friends.

All our opinions are false and don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. We live ,we die. We as individuals don’t matter in this world ,we will be a memory if anyone does remember us. We will be lucky.But soon , our memory will die with them and maybe someone will utter our name in passing in this age of technology ,as a footnote to something that grabbed more of their attention. Ultimately in this world our lives do not matter. So why do we feel we are in a one man play? Why do we want to accomplish so much just to be bellowed as heroes or heroines, to be adored or thought highly of by other people who do not even have favorable opinions of themselves? You see the truth is that the trace we leave In this world do not matter in this world, the track we leave in this world is what matters in the afterlife and it will be mirror in the memory of your future. Everything we do today is either for our own comforts or to avoid discomfort we are living in a perpetual state of pleasing ourselves , self gratification and being busy bodies for the momentarily exhalation of relief that will almost always follow up with a crisis. No one will have a continuous state of bliss as the pendulum swings up it will eventually come down before it comes back up again, yet we act surprised and devastated. This life is a perpetual test to try to develop and polish your outlook and inner life so you may be the lucky ones to develop the acuteness to see this world for what it is, and not lose that vision. An illusion of forms presenting the beauty and ugliness of our souls to us on a platter and tempting us to forget we are mortal. You don’t finish school when you graduate with that degree. You finish school when you die.

All the great stories begin with understanding humility, at least the stories you remember.

Almost alone among successful politicians, he took slights personally.

All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.

Almost every so called setback is an opportunity for growth, learning, self love, wisdom and humility

A man can counterfeit love, he can counterfeit faith, he can counterfeit hope and all the other graces, but it is very difficult to counterfeit humility. You soon detect mock humility.