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

Humility never falls, for it lies beneath everything.

I saw the snares that the enemy spreads out over the world and I said groaning, 'What can get through from such snares?' Then I heard a voice saying to me, 'Humility.'

Do not hate the sinner. Become a proclaimer of God's grace, seeing that God provides for you even though you are unworthy.

Knowing the exact nature of everything, God permits each person to be tested according to his strength. As St. Paul puts it: 'God is to be trusted not to let you be tried beyond your strength, but with the trial He will provide a way out, so that you are able to bear it' (1 Cor. 10:13).

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...

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

In the humble God rejoices, but from the proud He is driven away; where there is humility, the glory of God shines forth.

'And forgive us our debts as we also forgive our debtors.' For we have many sins. For we offend both in word and in thought, and very many things we do worthy of condemnation; and 'if we say that we have no sin' (I Jn. 1:8), we lie, as John says...The offenses committed against us are slight and trivial, and easily settled; but those which we have committed against God are great, and need such mercy as His only is. Take heed, therefore, lest for the slight and trivial sins against you, you shut out for yourself forgiveness from God for your very grievous sins.

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

Sin disfigures a man, while grace brings beauty.

Labor to acquire meekness. Concerning the heavenly virtues, meekness and humility, the Lord Himself teaches us, saying: Learn of Me, for I am meek and humble in heart; and ye shall find rest unto your souls (Matt. 11:29). Learn not from angels, nor from men, but from Me, He says; that is, from the higher wisdom.

Be despised and rejected in your own eyes, and you will see the glory of God within yourself. For where humility blossoms, there God’s glory bursts forth.

The virtue opposed to pride is humility. But as far as pride is loathsome and abominable, so welcome and lovely is humility to God and men. God Who is great and exalted looks on nothing so lovely as on an humble and compunctionate heart. Whence even the Most Holy Theotokos says of herself, For He hath regarded the low estate of His handmaiden. (Luke 1:48).

For never is a man forced into sin by another’s fault, unless he have, stowed away in his heart, matter for evil deeds. Nor is a man to be held a victim of sudden deception if at the sight of a woman’s beauty he fall into an abyss of vile lust. Rather is it that diseases of soul, deeply hidden away and lost to view, come then to the surface on the occasion of the sight.

There is nothing more powerful than lowliness.

When it is needful that a person be humbled, then not only the Superior, the sisters, strangers and near ones, but even all creation, according to the words of St. Isaac the Syrian, will rise up against that person.

Grace always precedes temptation, as if to notify you saying, 'Prepare yourself and lock your doors.'

If we are humble, God helps us to fight our sinfulness; if we are proud, He does not.

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