Humility – select quotes

Life is a long lesson in humility.
~ James M. Barrie

The higher we are placed, the more humbly should we walk.
~ Cicero

Nothing sets a person so much out of the devil’s reach as humility.
~ Jonathan Edwards

You must therefore conceal from the patient the true end of Humility. Let him think of it, not as self-forgetfulness, but as a certain kind of opinion (namely, a low opinion) of his own talents and character. Some talents, I gather he really has. Fix in his mind the idea that humility consists in trying to believe those talents to be less valuable that he believes them to be…. The great thing is to make him value an opinion for some quality other than truth, thus introducing an element of dishonesty and make-believe into the heart of what otherwise threatens to become a virtue. By this method thousands of humans have been brought to think that humility means pretty women trying to believe they are ugly and clever men trying to believe they are fools. And since what they are trying to believe may, in some cases, be manifest nonsense, they cannot succeed in believing it, and we have the chance of keeping their minds endlessly revolving on themselves in an effort to achieve the impossible.
~ Screwtape talking to Wormwood, in C.S. Lewis’ book The Screwtape Letters, NY: Bantam, 1982, page 41

Humility, that low, sweet root,
From which all heavenly virtues shoot.
~ Thomas Moore

Humility is the bloom and beauty of holiness.
~ Andrew Murray

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