2,389 Quotes About Humility

The more you are as a person, the less you need to prove yourself to others.

He had never been a man who attracted women, and he exaggerated their coldness towards him. Indeed in regard to the love of women he had a physical humility that was almost a mania. One of the strongest holds that Mary had over him was the simple fact that she, a sweet-looking, intellectual girl, could be in love with him at all! Secretly John regarded himself as the most unlovable human creature then living in Glastonbury.

The best people live quietly and humbly as though they barely exist.

... nothing is more insidious than spiritual pride; nothing is more impervious to identification. No, the monastic mind0set says, spiritual development is not an event. Spiritual development is a process of continuing conversion. "What do you do in the monastery?" an ancient tale asks. "Oh, we fall and we get up. We fall and we get up," the old monastic answers. In monastic spirituality, we never arrive; we are always arriving.

Humility is reality to the full.

I want to be special,” I said obstinately at last.“So does everyone else. So we have to take turns.”‘But some people are more special than others, aren’t they?“Juniper suddenly got extremely irritated. "The really special ones are the ones who don’t even think about it,” she said.

[Humility means] a deep sense of our own meanness, with a hearty [sincere (Johnson)] and affectionate [strongly moved; warm; zealous (Johnson)] acknowledgment of our owing all that we are to the divine bounty [generosity; liberality; munificence (Johnson)]; which is always accompanied with a profound submission to the will of God, and great deadness to the glory of the world, and the applause of men.

Humility is not the personal discount that we must offer in the presence of others—against this old interpretation there has been a most healthy modern reaction. True humility any man who thoroughly knows himself must feel; but it is not a humility that assumes a worm-like meekness; it is rather a strong, vibrant prayer for greater power for service

For what is modesty but hypocritical humility, by means of which, in a world swelling with vile envy, a man seeks to beg pardon for his excellences and merits from those who have none?For whoever attributes no merit to himself because he really has none is not modest, but merely honest.