Quotes About Humility And Pride

“The moral narcissist's extreme humility masked a dreadful pride. Ordinary people could accept that they had faults; the moral narcissist could not.”

— Larissa MacFarquhar

“Humility and pride will forever battle whenever or wherever love is concerned”

— Jeremy Aldana

“When you really have something to offer to the world, then you can become truly humble. A tree when it has no fruit to offer, remains erect. But when the tree is laden with fruit, it bends down. If you are all pride and ego, then nobody will be able to get anything worthwhile from you. When you have genuine humility, it is a sign that you have something to offer to mankind.”

— Sri Chinmoy

“Ingratitude produces pride while gratitude produces humility.”

— Orrin Woodward

“A wise man is able to differentiate between humility and weakness, he does not mistake courage for pride.”

— Newton Gatambia

“Standing out there in th dark, I felt many different things. One of them was pride in my fellow Americans, ordinary people who rose to the moment, knowing it was their last. One was humility, for I was alive and untouched by the horrors of that day, free to continue my happy life as a husband and father and writer. In the lonely blackness, I could almost taste the finiteness of life and thus it's preciousness. We take it for granted, but it is fragile, precarious, uncertain able to cease at any instant without notice. I was reminded of what should be obvious but too often is not, that each today, each hour and minute, is worth cherishing.”

— John Grogan

“We have no way of knowing, of course, why some are born in health and affluence, while others enter broken bodies or broken homes, or emerge into a realm of war or hunger. So we cannot give definite meaning to our place in the world, or to our neighbor's. But Plato's reflections should give us pause and invite both humility and hope. Humility, because if we chose our lot in life, there is every reason to suspect merit, and not disfavor, is behind disadvantaged birth. A blighted life may have been the more courageous choice
at least it was for Plato ... So how can we feel pride in our own blessedness, or condescension in another's misfortune? And Plato's reflections should give us hope, because his myth reminds us that suffering can be sanctifying, that pain is not punishment ,and that the path to virtue is fraught with opposition.”

— Fiona Givens

“What is childlike humility? It's not the lack of intelligence, but the lack of guile. The lack of an agenda. It's that precious, fleeting time before we have accumulated enough pride or position to care what other people might think. The same un-self-conscious honesty that enables a three-year-old to splash joyfully in a rain puddle, or tumble laughing in the grass with a puppy, or point out loudly that you have a booger hanging out of your nose, is what is required to enter heaven. It is the opposite of ignorance-it is intellectual honesty: to be willing to accept reality and to call things what they are even when it is hard.”

— Todd Burpo

“I have no pride left, Ambrose! Bailey said. No pride. But it was my pride or my life. I had to choose. So do you. You can have your pride and sit here and make cupcakes and get old and fat and nobody will give a damn after a while. Or you can trade that pride in for a little humility and take your life back.”

— Amy Harmon

“Happiness was the responsibility you dreaded, it required the kind of rational discipline you did not value yourself enough to assume - and the anxious staleness of your days is the monument to your evasion of the knowledge that there is no moral substitute for happiness, that there is no more despicable coward than the man who deserted the battle for his joy, fearing to assert his right to existence, lacking the courage and the loyalty to life of a bird or a flower reaching for the sun. Discard the protective rags of that vice which you called a virtue: humility - learn to value yourself, which means: to fight for your happiness - and when you learn that pride is the sum of all virtues, you will learn to live like a man.”

— Ayn Rand

“Humility exalteth man to the heaven of glory and power, whilst pride abaseth him to the depths of wretchedness and degradation.”

— Bahaullah

“Pride and ego makes a mockery of an apology. Humility wins forgiveness without question ... so break 'yo'self'!”

— T.F. Hodge

“A man who is eating or lying with his wife or preparing to go to sleep in humility, thankfulness and temperance, is, by Christian standards, in an infinitely higher state than one who is listening to Bach or reading Plato in a state of pride.”

— C.S. Lewis

“It was pride that changed angels into devils; it is humility that makes men as angels.”

— Augustine Of Hippo

“Put off the fire of pride and save your life from burning with flames of failure. Pride is the reason why many dreams only survive as ashes today. Learn the lesson; hung on to humility!”

— Israelmore Ayivor

“The emphasis and the reason for a pure humility is to result in love for others; not always necessarily the belittlement of self. When there is pride and self-righteousness and being pretentiously too far above, generally, one has a difficult time reaching the compassionate side of love for others, the side that understands (or at least attempts to understand): 'I am aware that I am not so far from falling in the same way.' Humility seeks to understand, and sometimes even relate; and in result, the love lovingly, properly, effectively wills the removal of the destructive sins of another as from oneself.”

— Criss Jami

“When I begin praying Christ into someone's life, God often permits suffering in that person's life. If Satan's basic game plan is pride, seeking to draw us into his life of arrogance, then God's basic game plan is humility, drawing us into the life of his Son.”

— Paul E. Miller

“False humility is the pride of not being proud, real humility is without the consciousness that pride exists.”

— Michael Bassey Johnson

“Obedience and humility require courage and strength of character. Weakness and fear cause one to fall back on his or her pride, which results in a vicious cycle”

— Sienna McQuillen

“When pride comes, then comes disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom.”

— Anonymous.

“It is true that I have been studying both humility and pride for many years for the purpose of weakening pride in my own life and cultivating humility by the grace of God.”

— C.J. Mahaney

“The truth is this: Pride must die in you or nothing of heaven can live in you. Under the banner of the truth, give yourself up to the meek and humble spirit of the holy Jesus. Humility must sow the seed or there can be no reaping in heaven. Look not at pride only as an unbecoming temper, nor at humility only as a decent virtue: for the one is death and the other is life; the one is hell and the other is heaven. So much as you have of pride within you, you have of the fallen angel alive in you; so much as you have of true humility, so much you have of the Lamb of God within you.”

— Andrew Murray

“Once someone asked, when I was present, what constituted the greatest pleasure in love. Someone replied, naturally: in receiving. Another: in giving. Someone said: the pleasure of pride! someone else: the ecstasy of humility! All these muckers making like the Imitation of Christ. Finally, an impudent utopian was found who insisted that the greatest pleasure of love was in forming new citizens for the fatherland. Me, I said: what is uniquely, supremely voluptuous about love lies in the certainty of doing evil.”

— Charles Baudelaire

“Relativism poses as humble by saying: "We are not smart enough to know what the truth is-or if there is any universal truth." It sounds humble. But look carefully at what is happening. It's like a servant saying: I am not smart enough to know which person here is my master-or if I even have a master. The result is that I don't have a master and I can be my own master. That is in reality what happens to relativists: In claiming to be too lowly to know the truth, they exalt themselves as supreme arbiter of what they can think and do. This is not humility. This is the essence of pride.”

— John Piper

“It is impossible to draw near to God without sorrows, without which human righteousness cannot remain unchanged ... If you desire virtue, than give yourself to every affliction, for afflictions produce humility. If someone abides in virtue without afflictions, the door of pride is opened to him.”

— Isaac Of Nineveh

“Pride is associated with failure, not success. We hear a great deal about the inferiority complex, but the superiority complex of pride is seldom spoken of ... The greatest act of humility ... was when Jesus Christ stooped to die on the cross of Calvary.”

— Billy Graham

“Gratitude is twin sister to humility; Pride is foe to both.”

— James E. Talmage

“Oh, Brethren, what is the result of pride? Oh, see what humility can do? What was the need for all these sufferings? For, if from the beginning Man had humbled himself, obeyed God, and kept the commandment he would not have fallen.”

— Dorotheus Of Gaza

“An angel fell from Heaven without any other passion except pride, and so we may ask whether it is possible to ascend to Heaven by humility alone, without any other of the virtues.”

— John Climacus

“Whatever hinders us from receiving a blessing that God is willing to bestow upon us is not humility, but the mockery of it. A genuine humility will ever feel the need of the largest measures of grace, and will be perfected just in the degree in which that grace is bestowed. The truly humble man will seek to be filled with all the fullness of God, knowing that when so filled there is not the slightest place for pride or for self.”

— George Bowen

“The virtue of pride, which was once the beauty of mankind, has given place to that fount of ugliness, Christian humility.”

— Max Ernst

“The foundation of humility is truth. The humble man sees himself as he is. If his depreciation of himself were untrue, ... it wouldnot be praiseworthy, and would be a form of hypocrisy, which is one of the evils of Pride. The man who is falsely humble, we know from our own experience, is one who is falsely proud.”

— Henry Fairlie

“If you would like to live in a community in which you may have pride, then dedicate yourself in a spirit of humility and your responsibilities in that community.”

— Herbert V. Prochnow

“Humility is also a healing virtue; it will cicatrize a thousand wounds, which pride would keep forever open.”

— Washington Allston

“Let us pray God, if He gives us any virtue or any gift, to keep it hidden even from ourselves, that we may preserve our humility, and not take occasion of pride because of it.”

— Philip Neri

“How can there be pride in a contrite heart? Humility is the earliest fruit of religion.”

— Hosea Ballou

“Let your old age be childlike, and your childhood like old age; that is, so that neither may your wisdom be with pride, nor your humility without wisdom.”

— Saint Augustine

“The battle against pride in the heart is lifelong, so humility should become an ever more deeply seated attitude of living”

— J.I. Packer

“And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin is pride that apes humility.”

— Samuel Taylor Coleridge

“Pride dries the tears of anger and vexation; humility, those of grief. The one is indignant that we should suffer; the other calms us by the reminder that we deserve nothing else.”

— Sophie Swetchine

“There are no friends more inseparable than pride and hardness of heart, humility and love, falsehood and impudence.”

— Johann Kaspar Lavater

“There was a moment of extraordinary humbleness and humility and pride, as well, with my father when he turned to me - and I think it was after I played Salieri in "Amadeus" at university. And he said, You're better than I ever was or ever could be, you should do this for profession. You'd have a good time.”

— Benedict Cumberbatch

“Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.”

— Francois De La Rochefoucauld

“Where God's Spirit does not reign, there is no humility, and men ever swell with inward pride.”

— John Calvin

“I say the same of humility and of all the virtues; the wiles of the devil are terrible, he will run a thousand times round hell if by so doing he can make us believe that we have a single virtue which we have not. And he is right, for such ideas are very harmful, and such imaginary virtues, when they come from this source, are never unaccompanied by vainglory; just as those which God gives are free both from this and from pride.”

— Teresa Of Avila

“On Pride: This sickness is most dangerous when it succeeds in looking like humility. When a proud man thinks he is humble his case is hopeless.”

— Thomas Merton

“At every step of our Christian development and in every sphere of our Christian discipleship, pride is the greatest enemy and humility our greatest friend.”

— John Stott

“The most transformative and gentle humility and pride. But they transform in opposite ways.”

— Radhanath Swami

“In placid hours well-pleased we dream Of many a brave unbodied scheme. But form to lend, pulsed life create, What unlike things must meet and mate: A flame to melt
a wind to freeze; Sad patience
joyous energies; Humility
yet pride and scorn; Instinct and study; love and hate; Audacity
reverence. These must mate, And fuse with Jacob's mystic heart, To wrestle with the angel
Art.”

— Herman Melville

“They find seven cornices on which penitent and redeemed sinners are cleansed by the grace of God. On the first cornice, that of Pride, the proud are learning humility: Our Father, dwelling in the Heavens, nowise As circumscribed, but as the things above, Thy first effects, are dearer in Thine eyes, Hallowed Thy name be and the Power thereof, By every creature, as right meet it is We praise the tender effluence of Thy love. Let come to us, let come Thy kingdom's peace.”

— Dante Alighieri