#humility

The common man prays, 'I want a cookie right now!' And God responds, 'If you'd listen to what I say, tomorrow it will bring you 100 cookies. ↗

— Criss Jami

#cookie #cute #faithfulness #funny #god

A true Democratic Spirit is up there with religious faith and emotional maturity and all those other top-of-the-Maslow-Pyramid-type qualities that people spend their whole lives working on. A Democratic Spirit's constituent rigor and humility and self-honesty are, in fact, so hard to maintain on certain issues that it's almost irresistibly tempting to fall in with some established dogmatic camp and to follow that camp's line on the issue and to let your position harden within the camp and become inflexible and to believe that he other camps are either evil or insane and to spend all your time and energy trying to shout over them. ↗

— David Foster Wallace

#humility #open-mindedness #faith

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

#love #pride #thinking #faith

The man who does good in doubt must have so much more merit than one who does it in the bright certainty of belief. "Other sheep I have which are not of this fold..." A warning against the smugness of inherited faith. ↗

— Morris L. West

#giacomo-nerone #humility #faith

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

#friendliness #hospitality #humility #incarnation #meeting-people

If there is one single reason why good people turn evil, it is because they fail to recognize God’s ownership over their kingdom, their vocation, their resources, their abilities, and above all their lives. ↗

— Erwin W. Lutzer

#sovereignty-of-god #forgiveness

It's a kind of arrogance to be so certain you're past redemption. ↗

— Ellis Peters

#humility #forgiveness

We have a strange illusion that mere time cancels sin. I have heard others, and I have heard myself, recounting cruelties and falsehoods committed in boyhood as if they were no concern of the present speaker's, and even with laughter. But mere time does nothing either to the fact or to the guilt of a sin. The guilt is washed out not by time but by repentance and the blood of Christ: if we have repented these early sins we should remember the price of our forgiveness and be humble. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#guilt #humility #repentance #sin #time

...the essence of gospel-humility is not thinking more of myself or thinking less of myself, it is thinking of myself less. ↗

— Timothy Keller

#pride #freedom

Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of Action; and bidding an Affectionate farewell to this August body under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer my Commission, and take my leave of all the employments of public life. (Address to Congress on Resigning Commission Dec 23, 1783) ↗

— George Washington

#humility #patriotism #restraint #freedom