A collection of scriptural meditations from Saints and Fathers of the Church.

When you humble yourself, everyone will seem saintly to you; when you are proud, everyone will seem bothersome and bad.

Keep both eyes open. This is the measure of humility: if a man is humble he never thinks that he has been treated worse than he deserves. He stands so low in his own estimation that no one, however hard they try, can think more poorly of him than he thinks of himself.

Our achievements must never loom large in our eyes; only our failures. But this must never lead us to despondency - the constant temptation - only to humility.

Love and humility form a holy pair; what the first builds, the second binds, thus preventing the building from falling asunder.

If someone is judged worthy to receive the gift of knowledge but allows his heart to be full of bitterness or rancor or aversion to another, it is as if he had been struck in the eye by a thornbush. That is why knowledge is no good without charity.

Compassion and humility are like the soul’s wings by which it flies up to heaven (Ps. 104:7). Without them prayer cannot rise off the ground...

The way of humility is this: self-control, prayer, and thinking yourself inferior to all creatures.

He who seeks glory from men travels by the path of pride, but he who seeks glory from God travels by the path of humility.

Keep a strict watch against any appearance of pride: it appears imperceptibly, particularly in time of vexation and irritability against others for quite unimportant causes.

As with the appearance of light, darkness retreats; so, at the fragrance of humility, all anger and bitterness vanishes.

Live very modestly. Be very humble. Don't speak idly about humility, but be like rubbish for people to step on, if you want Christ to visit you. Your heart needs to become as soft as cotton.

Humility never falls, for it lies beneath everything.

Humility has such power that it inclines even the hard of heart. For God, the lover of humility, works through the humble.

Self-esteem is so deeply rooted in us and so firmly enmeshed in us, making us think that we are something, and something not unimportant, that it always hides in our heart as a subtle and imperceptible movement, even when we are sure that we do not trust ourselves and are, on the contrary, filled with complete trust in God alone. In order to avoid this conceit of the heart and act without any self-reliance, led only by your trust in God, take care always to preserve an attitude in which the consciousness and feeling of your weakness always precede in you the contemplation of God's omnipotence, and let both alike precede your every action.

Nothing so abets our secret destruction as conceit and self-satisfaction, or so cuts us off from God and provokes our chastisement at the hands of other men as grumbling, or so disposes us to sin as a disorderly life and talkativeness.

Not one of us can boast of having acquired humility: our actions, the whole of our life, prove the contrary. And where there is a lack of humility, pride is always present. Where light is wanting, darkness reigns.

For everyone who prays to God, ‘Lord, give me humility’ ought to know what he is asking for, viz. that God send him someone to mistreat him. And when he is insulted by someone, he ought to disparage himself and despise his own opinion so that when the other man humiliates him outwardly, he too humiliates himself inwardly.

A haughty person is not aware of his faults, or a humble person of his good qualities. An evil ignorance blinds the first, an ignorance pleasing to God blinds the second.

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Archangel Michael Orthodox Church
5025 E. Mill Rd
Broadview Heights, Ohio 44147

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