68 Humility Quotes To Inspire

In a world that often emphasizes self-promotion and individual achievement, the virtue of humility can sometimes feel like a rare gem. Yet, humility remains a powerful force, offering a refreshing counterbalance to ego and pride. It allows us to recognize our limitations, appreciate others, and move through life with grace and wisdom. Whether you’re seeking to ground yourself, improve your relationships, or simply find some daily inspiration, we've gathered a curated collection of the top 68 humility quotes that are sure to inspire and uplift you. Dive in and rediscover the quiet strength that comes from embracing humility.

1. “To believe you are magnificent. And gradually to discover that you are not magnificent. Enough labor for one human life.” - Czesław Miłosz

2. “It is unwise to be too sure of one's own wisdom. It is healthy to be reminded that the strongest might weaken and the wisest might err.” - Mahatma Gandhi

3. “I have met some highly intelligent believers, but history has no record to say that [s]he knew or understood the mind of god. Yet this is precisely the qualification which the godly must claim—so modestly and so humbly—to possess. It is time to withdraw our 'respect' from such fantastic claims, all of them aimed at the exertion of power over other humans in the real and material world.” - Christopher Hitchens

4. “See everything, overlook a great deal, correct a little.” - John XXIII

5. “Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It *is*--is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.To be nothing in the self-effacement of humility, yet, for the sake of the task, to embody its whole weight and importance in your earing, as the one who has been called to undertake it. To give to people, works, poetry, art, what the self can contribute, and to take, simply and freely, what belongs to it by reason of its identity. Praise and blame, the winds of success and adversity, blow over such a life without leaving a trace or upsetting its balance.” - Dag Hammarskjöld

6. “I believe that the first test of a great man is his humility. I don't mean by humility, doubt of his power. But really great men have a curious feeling that the greatness is not of them, but through them. And they see something divine in every other man and are endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful.” - John Ruskin

7. “Life is a long lesson in humility.” - J.M. Barrie

8. “Know then thyself, presume not God to scan,The proper study of mankind is Man.Placed on this isthmus of a middle state,A being darkly wise and rudely great:With too much knowledge for the Sceptic side,With too much weakness for the Stoic's pride,He hangs between, in doubt to act or rest;In doubt to deem himself a God or Beast;In doubt his mind or body to prefer;Born but to die, and reas'ning but to err;Alike in ignorance, his reason such,Whether he thinks too little or too much;Chaos of thought and passion, all confused;Still by himself abused or disabused;Created half to rise, and half to fall;Great lord of all things, yet a prey to all;Sole judge of truth, in endless error hurl'd;The glory, jest, and riddle of the world!Go, wondrous creature! mount where science guides,Go, measure earth, weigh air, and state the tides;Instruct the planets in what orbs to run,Correct old time, and regulate the sun;Go, soar with Plato to th’ empyreal sphere,To the first good, first perfect, and first fair;Or tread the mazy round his followers trod,And quitting sense call imitating God;As Eastern priests in giddy circles run,And turn their heads to imitate the sun.Go, teach Eternal Wisdom how to rule—Then drop into thyself, and be a fool!” - Alexander Pope

9. “He didn't mind how he looked to other people, because the nursery magic had made him Real, and when you are Real shabbiness doesn't matter.” - Margery Williams Bianco

10. “The soul is healed by being with children.” - Fyodor Dostoevsky

11. “You must know nothing before you can learn something, and be empty before you can be filled. Is not the emptiness of the bowl what makes it useful? As for laws, a parrot can repeat them word for word. Their spirit is something else again. As for governing, one must first be lowest before being highest.” - Lloyd Alexander

12. “You know, I think it's important to keep a balance in things. Yeah, balance, that's the right word. Cause the guy who wants too much risks losing absolutely everything. Of course, the one who wants too little from life, might not get anything at all.” - Thomas Angelo

13. “Humility has nothing to do with depreciating ourselves and our gifts in ways we know to be untrue. Even "humble" attitudes can be masks of pride. Humility is that freedom from our self which enables us to be in positions in which we have neither recognition nor importance, neither power nor visibility, and even experience deprivation, and yet have joy and delight. It is the freedom of knowing that we are not in the center of the universe, not even in the center of our own private universe.” - David F. Wells

14. “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.” - Noah BenShea

15. “Who is more humble? The scientist who looks at the universe with an open mind and accepts whatever the universe has to teach us, or somebody who says everything in this book must be considered the literal truth and never mind the fallibility of all the human beings involved?” - Carl Sagan

16. “We are aware that the order of God requires the exercise of humility, but not of servility of slaves; but a humility that can be associated with undoubted courage and unflinching integrity; at the same time there is no room for pride, self-sufficient pride, that rests solely upon its own capabilities, and refuses to look for the support and countenance of others.--MS 7:91 [MS is the Millenial Star]” - John A. Widtsoe

17. “Man approaches God most nearly when he is in one sense least like God. For what can be more unlike than fullness and need, sovereignty and humility, righteousness and penitence, limitless power and a cry for help?” - C.S. Lewis

18. “I have three precious things which I hold fast and prize. The first is gentleness; the second is frugality; the third is humility, which keeps me from putting myself before others. Be gentle and you can be bold; be frugal and you can be liberal; avoid putting yourself before others and you can become a leader among men.” - Lao Tzu

19. “We are all apprentices in a craft where no one ever becomes a master.” - Ernest Hemingway

20. “We have lived by the assumption that what was good for us would be good for the world. And this has been based on the even flimsier assumption that we could know with any certainty what was good even for us. We have fulfilled the danger of this by making our personal pride and greed the standard of our behavior toward the world - to the incalculable disadvantage of the world and every living thing in it. And now, perhaps very close to too late, our great error has become clear. It is not only our own creativity - our own capacity for life - that is stifled by our arrogant assumption; the creation itself is stifled.We have been wrong. We must change our lives, so that it will be possible to live by the contrary assumption that what is good for the world will be good for us. And that requires that we make the effort to know the world and to learn what is good for it. We must learn to cooperate in its processes, and to yield to its limits. But even more important, we must learn to acknowledge that the creation is full of mystery; we will never entirely understand it. We must abandon arrogance and stand in awe. We must recover the sense of the majesty of creation, and the ability to be worshipful in its presence. For I do not doubt that it is only on the condition of humility and reverence before the world that our species will be able to remain in it. (pg. 20, "A Native Hill")” - Wendell Berry

21. “I'm a writer by profession and it's totally clear to me that since I started blogging, the amount I write has increased exponentially, my daily interactions with the views of others have never been so frequent, the diversity of voices I engage with is far higher than in the pre-Internet age—and all this has helped me become more modest as a thinker, more open to error, less fixated on what I do know, and more respectful of what I don't. If this is a deterioration in my brain, then more, please."The problem is finding the space and time when this engagement stops, and calm, quiet, thinking and reading of longer-form arguments, novels, essays can begin. Worse, this also needs time for the mind to transition out of an instant gratification mode to me a more long-term, thoughtful calm. I find this takes at least a day of detox. Getting weekends back has helped. But if there were a way to channel the amazing insights of blogging into the longer, calmer modes of thinking ... we'd be getting somewhere."I'm working on it.” - Andrew Sullivan

22. “There are two things that men should never weary of, goodness and humility; we get none too much of them in this rough world among cold, proud people.” - Robert Louis Stevenson

23. “To learn which questions are unanswerable, and not to answer them: this skill is most needful in times of stress and darkness.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

24. “Oh Lord Most High, Creator of the Cosmos, Spinner of Galaxies, Soul of Electromagnetic Waves, Inhaler and Exhaler of Inconceivable Volumes of Vacuum, Spitter of Fire and Rock, Trifler with Millennia — what could we do for Thee that Thou couldst not do for Thyself one octillion times better? Nothing. What could we do or say that could possibly interest Thee? Nothing. Oh, Mankind, rejoice in the apathy of our Creator, for it makes us free and truthful and dignified at last. No longer can a fool point to a ridiculous accident of good luck and say, 'Somebody up there likes me.' And no longer can a tyrant say, 'God wants this or that to happen, and anyone who doesn't help this or that to happen is against God.' O Lord Most High, what a glorious weapon is Thy Apathy, for we have unsheathed it, have thrust and slashed mightily with it, and the claptrap that has so often enslaved us or driven us into the madhouse lies slain!" -The prayer of the Reverend C. Horner Redwine” - Kurt Vonnegut

25. “Everybody who is incapable of learning has taken to teaching.” - Oscar Wilde

26. “Such excessive preoccupation with his faults is not a truly spiritual activity but, on the contrary, a highly egoistic one.The recognition of his own faults should make a man humbler, when it is beneficial, not prouder, which the thought that he ought to have been above these faults makes him.” - Paul Brunton

27. “You cannot exalt God and yourself at the same time.” - Rick Warren

28. “True humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less.” - Rick Warren

29. “A truly Christian love, either to God or men, is a humble broken-hearted love. The desires of the saints, however earnest, are humble desires. Their hope is a humble hope; and their joy, even when it is unspeakable and full of glory, is a humble broken-hearted joy, and leaves the Christian more poor in spirit, and more like a little child, and more disposed to a universal lowliness of behaviour.” - Jonathan Edwards

30. “For thousands of years, it had been nature--and its supposed creator--that had had a monopoly on awe. It had been the icecaps, the deserts, the volcanoes and the glaciers that had given us a sense of finitude and limitation and had elicited a feeling in which fear and respect coagulated into a strangely pleasing feeling of humility, a feeling which the philosophers of the eighteenth century had famously termed the sublime.But then had come a transformation to which we were still the heirs.... Over the course of the nineteenth century, the dominant catalyst for that feeling of the sublime had ceased to be nature. We were now deep in the era of the technological sublime, when awe could most powerfully be invoked not by forests or icebergs but by supercomputers, rockets and particle accelerators. We were now almost exclusively amazed by ourselves.” - Alain De Botton

31. “Humility and pride will forever battle whenever or wherever love is concerned” - Jeremy Aldana

32. “The disillusionment with our own abilities is, perhaps, one of the most important things that can ever happen to us.” - Tim Hansel

33. “It was the outstanding fact about St. Thomas [Aquinas] that he loved books and lived on books ... When asked for what he thanked God most, he answered simply, ‘I have understood every page I ever read’.” - G.K. Chesterton

34. “A fear of weakness only strengthens weakness.” - Criss Jami

35. “I have the charisma of the chipmunk. I never have thought I was smart. I thought the people I dealt with were dumb.” - Hyman George Rickover

36. “Suns are extinguished or become corrupted, planets perish and scatter across the wastes of the sky; other suns are kindled, new planets formed to make their revolutions or describe new orbits, and man, an infinitely minute part of a globe which itself is only an imperceptible point in the immense whole, believes that the universe is made for himself.” - Baron d'Holbach

37. “Humility, the place of entire dependence on God, is the first duty and the highest virtue of the creature, and the root of every virtue. And so pride, or the loss of this humility, is the root of every sin and evil.” - Andrew Murray

38. “Humility is nothing but the disappearance of self in the vision that God is all.” - Andrew Murray

39. “Humility is simply the disposition which prepares the soul for living on trust.” - Andrew Murray

40. “We feel that, for the honour of God (and also, though we do not say this, for the sake of our own reputation as spiritual Christians), it is necessary for us to claim that we are, so to speak, already in the signal-box, here and now enjoying the inside information as to the why and wherefore of God’s doings. This comforting pretence becomes part of us: we feel sure that God has enabled us to understand all His ways with us and our circle thus far, and we take if for granted that we shall be able to see at once the reason for anything that may happen to us in the future. And then something very painful and quite inexplicable comes along, and our cheerful illusion of being in God’s secret councils is shattered. Our pride is wounded; we feel that God has slighted us; and unless at this point we repent, and humble ourselves very thoroughly for our former presumption, our whole subsequent spriritual life may be blighted.” - J.I. Packer

41. “Lord, help me to begin to begin.” - George Whitefield

42. “The chief means of resisting manipulation is humility – knowing who we really are and facing it. You can only serve by love. You can only love by choice. True love cannot be the result of decree, force or manipulation. Jesus always kept his strength to make loving choices. He calls us to make loving choices necessary to be the servant of all." "Humility permits me to own my feelings – and to admit them. Now I'm free to say, ‘I'm angry’. I'm free to admit what I am reacting to. I am free to ask if anger is what the person wanted to produce in me, and to ask for help in changing if my reaction is inappropriate.” - Gayle D. Erwin

43. “Every subject's duty is the King's; but every subject's soul is his own. Therefore, should every soldier in the wars do as every sick man in his bed, wash every mote out of his conscience; and dying so, death is to him advantage; or not dying, the time was blessedly lost wherein such preparation was gained; and in him that escapes, it were no sin to think that, making God so free an offer, He let him outlive the day to see His greatness and to teach others how they should prepare.” - William Shakespeare

44. “By you, I was properly humbled. I came to you without a doubt of my reception. You shewed me how insufficient were all my pretensions to please a woman worthy of being pleased.” - Jane Austen

45. “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

46. “True humility means giving joy to others.” - Sri Chinmoy

47. “Knowing and thinking exist for the sake of love -- for the sake of building people up in faith. Thinking that produces pride instead of love is not true thinking.” - John Piper

48. “Could mankind declare it was truly wise? Did man know everything on earth, or would he ever? Certainly not!” - E.A. Bucchianeri

49. “While it is good that we seek to know the Holy One, it is probably not so good to presume that we ever complete the task.” - Dietrich Bonhoeffer

50. “By and large, the mission of any ghost is to offer humility. They point out what's important by mocking what is not.(Joshua Malina, Sports Night)” - Aaron Sorkin

51. “...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less.” - Timothy Keller

52. “Pride is yet again in the way of our mind’s ability to accept that we may not be the most intelligent and advanced people in the universe or on Earth since it was formed along with the solar system 4.5 billion years ago.” - Mario Stinger

53. “The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility. To be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if one has achieved an attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child. Love, being dependent on the relative absence of narcissism, requires the developement of humility, objectivity and reason. I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is narcissistically distorted, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs and fears.” - Erich Fromm

54. “Ingratitude produces pride while gratitude produces humility.” - Orrin Woodward

55. “It is only people who are lacking, or bad, or inferior, who have to be good at things. You have always been full and perfect, so you had nothing to make up for.” - T.H. White

56. “The one who is born of the earth, dreams of the sky. The one who is born of the sky, dreams of the earth.” - C. JoyBell C.

57. “It is good to be taught humility when we are young. If we do not exeperience pain as children, we will cause pain as adults.” - Darren Shan

58. “... no sensitive Christian can be satisfied with a distinction between righteousness and unrighteousness drawn only between communities, with each individual belonging unambiguously on one or the other side of the line. The behavior of "the righteous" is often very disappointing, while "the unrighteous" regularly perform in a manner that is much better than our theology might lead us to expect of them. Thus the need for a perspective that allows for both a rather slow process of sanctification in the Christian life and some sort of divine restraint on the power of sin in the unbelieving community. These theological adjustments to a religious perspective that might otherwise betray strong Manichean tones provide us with yet another reason for openness to a broad-ranging dialogue: Christians have good grounds for believing that their own weakness can be corrected by encountering the strengths of others.” - Richard J. Mouw

59. “Two classes of people make up the world: those who have found God, and those who are looking for Him - thirsting, hungering, seeking! And the great sinners came closer to Him than the proud intellectuals! Pride swells and inflates the ego; gross sinners are depressed, deflated and empty. They, therefore, have room for God. God prefers a loving sinner to a loveless 'saint'. Love can be trained; pride cannot. The man who thinks that he knows will rarely find truth; the man who knows he is a miserable, unhappy sinner, like the woman at the well, is closer to peace, joy and salvation than he knows.” - Fulton J. Sheen

60. “The greater the artist, the greater the doubt. Perfect confidence is granted to the less talented as a consolation prize."[Modernism's Patriarch (Time Magazine, June 10, 1996)]” - Robert Hughes

61. “We need mystery. Creator in her wisdom knew this. Mystery fills us with awe and wonder. They are the foundations of humility, and humility is the foundation of all learning. So we do not seek to unravel this. We honour it by letting it be that way forever.”The quote of a grandmother explaining The Great Mystery of the universe to her grandson.” - Richard Wagamese

62. “All true friendliness begins with fire and food and drink and the recognition of rain or frost. ...Each human soul has in a sense to enact for itself the gigantic humility of the Incarnation. Every man must descend into the flesh to meet mankind.” - G.K. Chesterton

63. “Had I been placed among those nations which are said to live still in the sweet freedom of nature's first laws, I assure you I should very gladly have portrayed myself here entire and wholly naked.Thus, reader, I am myself the matter of my book; you would be unreasonable to spend your leisure on so frivolous and vain a subject.” - Michel de Montaigne

64. “Humility: The most quietly profound professor in the university of Christian living.” - Evinda Lepins

65. “People who have trouble questioning their own country often have trouble admitting fault in themselves, both of which come from insecurity and lack of humility.” - Bryant McGill

66. “What each man is in Your eyes, thus he is, and no more.” - Francis of Assisi

67. “Let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity.” - St. Francis de Sales

68. “Humility consists in not esteeming ourselves above other men, and in not seeking to be esteemed above them.” - St. Francis de Sales