Our ideals, laws and customs should be based on the proposition that each generation, in turn, becomes the custodian rather than the absolute owner of our resources and each generation has the obligation to pass this inheritance on to the future.
—Charles Lindbergh
Humility is the embarrassment you feel when you tell people how wonderful you are.
—Laurence J. Peter
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless.
—T.S. Eliot
Life is a long lesson in humility.
—J. M. Barrie
If I only had a little humility, I'd be perfect.
—Ted Turner
The meeting of a customer and a clerk across the service counter in a store is as significant as two leaders of nations meeting over a conference table in search of peace. If peace and understanding is possible, it must occur in the moment that is present. It can occur only when relationship is real and unconditional. Relationship begins with thoughtless awareness, an openness that sees and hears with humility, and a consideration that has already forgiven all things that the mind might present as a barrier to unity.
—Booker Jones
Then the cook enters and approaches our table. He bows low before me. He is grateful to me, he explains, because since his years as a cook in a Buddhist monastery, he has had little opportunity to cook vegetarian food for anyone who appreciates it. The wild mushrooms, he tells me, were picked in a nearby forest. The greens are from gardens known for the quality of their vegetables. . . . He bows slowly, and thanks me once again. I stumble over my own words of gratitude as he quietly disappears into the kitchen. I never see him again. I didn't sleep that night. The cook's reverence and humility sliced through years of protective hardness and caught me without warning. His food was saturated with love, and its nurturance was almost too much to bear.
—Anne Scott
Mysticism and exaggeration go together. A mystic must not fear ridicule if he is to push all the way to the limits of humility or the limits of delight.
—Milan Kundera
Alas, I know if I ever became truly humble, I would be proud of it.
—Ben Franklin
In 1941 Sergeant James Allen Ward was awarded the Victoria Cross for climbing out onto the wing of his Wellington bomber at thirteen thousand feet to extinguish a fire in the starboard engine. Secured only by a rope around his waist, he smothered the fire and returned along the wing to the aircraft's cabin. Winston Churchill, an admirer of swashbuckling exploits, summoned the shy New Zealander to 10 Downing Street. Struck dumb with awe in Churchill's presence, Ward was unable to answer the prime minister's questions. Churchill surveyed the unhappy hero with some compassion. "You must feel very humble and awkward in my presence," he said.
"Yes, sir," managed Ward.
"Then you can imagine how humble and awkward I feel in yours," said Churchill.
—The Little, Brown Book of Anecdotes
It is better to deserve honors and not have them than to have them and not to deserve them.
—Mark Twain
I am no more humble than my talents require.
—Oscar Levant
But I'm not an artist. Maybe an artist with a small a.
—John Galliano
True love is quiescent, except in the nascent moments of true humility.
—Bryant H. McGill
He who speaks without modesty will find it difficult to make his words good.
—Confucius