Best 2588 quotes in «humility quotes» category

You know more than you think you know, just as you know less than you want to know.

You learn about gratitude by giving. You learn about humility by receiving, and in the pecking order of human qualities, I'd probably put humility somewhere before gratitude.

You must always strive to be the best, but you must never believe that you are.

You must purge yourself of all thoughts of self-importance, and all inclination to judge either yourself or others. You must go to power with humility and deep respect.

you must stop looking at the world through your head. You must look through your heart, instead.

You need to balance arrogance and humilitywhen you buy anything, it's an arrogant act. You are saying the markets are gyrating and somebody wants to sell this to me and I know more than everybody else so I am going to stand here and buy it. I am going to pay an 1/8th more than the next guy wants to pay and buy it. That's arrogant. And you need the humility to say 'but I might be wrong.' And you have to do that on everything

You probably have started losing touch with humility when your friends start avoiding you without telling you why.

Your brilliance comes from your spirit. To deny it is arrogance. To accept it is humility.

-You're gloating, Max. It's not flattering. Somebody needs to teach you a little humility.- -A good woman could do that.- -She'd have to be armed and dangerous.-

Your heart is the center of humility, your mind could be the source of arrogance.

You should never write your own resume, personal ad, or obituary.  In all three cases it is better to show your humility by letting someone else lie for you.

You should love one another and behave lovingly because when love comes, everything comes. You should speak to one another with love and humility. Love is the essence.

You shouldn't take pride in your natural talents any more than you should take pride in your sex, your race or color of your hair

Abilene had gone from boomtown to Bible Belt, from whorehouses to schoolmarms, without any of the intervening phases.

Zakath's face grew thoughtful. "You know something, Garion?" he said. "Man thinks he owns the world, but we share it with all sorts of creatures who are indifferent to our overlordship. They have their own societies, and I supposed even their own cultures. They don't even pay attention to us, do you?" "Only when we inconvenience them...It teaches us humility," Garion agreed.

Ability to see the cultural value of wilderness boils down, in the last analysis, to a question of intellectual humility. The shallow-minded modern who has lost his rootage in the land assumes that he has already discovered what is important; it is such who prate of empires, political or economic, that will last a thousand years. It is only the scholar who appreciates that all history consists of successive excursions from a single starting-point, to which man returns again and again to organize yet another search for a durable scale of values. It is only the scholar who understands why the raw wilderness gives definition and meaning to the human enterprise.

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.

You wish to be great, begin from the least. You are thinking to construct some mighty fabric in height; first think of the foundation of humility. And how great soever a mass of building one may wish and design to place above it, the greater the building is to be, the deeper does he dig his foundation.

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 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.

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

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 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 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!

... 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 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 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.

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.

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

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.

A humble person is comfortable in their own skin.

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

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?

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.