humility

Ask with Confidence, listen with humility.

Someone with a low degree of epistemic arrogance is not too visible, like a shy person at a cocktail party. We are not predisposed to respect humble people, those who try to suspend judgement. Now contemplate epistemic humility. Think of someone heavily introspective, tortured by the awareness of his own ignorance. He lacks the courage of the idiot, yet has the rare guts to say "I don't know." He does not mind looking like a fool or, worse, an ignoramus. He hesitates, he will not commit, and he agonizes over the consequences of being wrong. He introspects, introspects, and introspects until he reaches physical and nervous exhaustion.This does not necessarily mean he lacks confidence, only that he holds his own knowledge to be suspect. I will call such a person an epistemocrat; the province where the laws are structured with this kind of human fallibility in mind I will can an epistemocracy.

Confidence is this: Wearing your triumphs with humility, and wearing your scars with pride. Many of us do precisely the opposite.

A great man is always willing to be little.

watch out for schools that promise your kids will "experience success." I'm teaching Plato's Dialogues these days, and I noticed that Socrates never let his students experience success. Socrates won the argument every time.

The actual confident man, the man truly sure of himself, is not he who esteems himself higher than others, but he who is sure enough that he can bear to esteem others higher than himself.

If there is one thing the psychic taught me, it's that people and events are rarely who and what we think they are. They are more meaningful, more worth our attention-part of some finely choreographed, eternal dance that we would be wise to bow down before in gratitude and humility.

A wise man's goal shouldn't be to say something profound, but to say something useful.

The president notices that when he takes off his coat to dig, people take more notice of the visual than they did his preceding remarks.

Public servants in this Europe often do their best when they stop caring about whether they'll be fired.

He must become an apprentice to ordinary life.

The tailor put on the girdle, and resolved to go forth into the world, because he thought his workshop was too small for his valor.

I am one and when I am one I am none, and when I am none I have won.

Self-serving biases and self-centered agendas are cotton jammed in the ears of our conscience. Even if truth shouts, we can__ hear it.

I do not wish to talk about myself because I hold very deeply the belief that what is important is the work, not the person.

One of the ability of humility is the ability to take the second place without striving for self-promotion

To save myself I must face myself, which may be the hardest of all things to face.

To have humility is to experience reality, not in relation to ourselves, but in its sacred independence. It is to see, judge, and act from the point of rest in ourselves. Then, how much disappears, and all that remains falls into place.In the point of rest at the center of our being, we encounter a world where all things are at rest in the same way. Then a tree becomes a mystery, a cloud a revelation, each man a cosmos of whose riches we can only catch glimpses. The life of simplicity is simple, but it opens to us a book in which we never get beyond the first syllable.