Dr. Mardy's Quotes of the Week ("Humility")

January 25—31, 2026 | THIS WEEK'S THEME: “Humility”

Opening Line of the Week

A man must be in possession of quite an ego to begin a review of someone else’s memoir with a grandiose statement about himself, but nobody has ever accused Galbraith of being a Shrinking Violet.

When I came across this line many years ago, my mind immediately went to a similar remark from another well known figure who rejected false humility, Frank Lloyd Wright: “Early in life I had to choose between honest arrogance and hypocritical humility. I chose the former and have seen no reason to change.”

You should know, though, that Galbraith was not really bragging when he began his review of Chester Bowles’s 1971 memoir, My Years in Public Life, 1941-1969. He was simply suggesting that the careers of the two men paralleled each other in so many ways that he was the perfect person to review his book.

Galbraith went on to write: “He is a friend, which is a disadvantage only if the book in question is bad. Only then do you have to consider whether the author should get the truth from you or someone else. This, fortunately, is an extremely good book.”

For well over 2,000 memorable opening lines from every genre of world literature, go to www.GreatOpeningLines.com.

This Week’s Puzzler

This week’s Mystery Man a four stages of his adult life

On January 28, 1954, this man was born in San Jose, California (he celebrates his 72nd birthday this week). His father was a Baptist minister, and he was raised in an evangelical Christian tradition that placed a strong emphasis on serving God by serving others. After graduating from high school in 1972, he went on to earn a B.A. from California Baptist University, an M.A. from Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, and a Ph.D. from Fuller Theological Seminary.

In 1980, he and his wife Kay—along with a few of their friends—founded Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California. From 40 people at the first service, attendance grew slowly, and then rapidly. Fifteen years later, when a 3,500-seat Worship Center was completed, it was one of America’s fastest-growing churches, with average weekly attendance figures of over 20,000 people. Our Mystery Man had already become a legend in the evangelical community, but he was virtually unknown in popular culture.

That all changed dramatically in 2002 with the publication of The Purpose Driven Life, a book of spiritual reflections that became a mega-bestseller—and made its author an international celebrity. The book was on The New York Times bestseller list for ninety weeks and has currently sold well over 50 million copies. About the book, he said, “What I’m saying isn’t new; I just synthesize ideas and translate them into simple language.”

In the months after the book’s publication, more than a dozen people wrote to tell me about it. All were familiar with my interest in the literary device of chiasmus, and all thought I would enjoy this passage from the book:

I both enjoyed and admired the passage—so much, in fact, that I soon began referring to it as one of the best things ever said on the subject of humility. And while I found myself in stark disagreement with the author on many of the “hot button” issues of the day, I greatly admired how his book had deftly blended traditional Christian ideas with insights from pop psychology and the “self-help” movement.

Who is this person? (Answer below)

What Does the Word “Humility” Mean to You?

I’ve never written anything on the subject of humility until now, and if I’m being completely honest, I’m not sure I truly understand what the word actually means.

Yes, I know that humility is a virtue in the Judeo-Christian tradition—and in other world religions. And yes, I know that the vice counterpart to humility is pride. And, being a lifelong quotation collector, I’m familiar with many memorable observations on the subject, as you see in the brief sampling above. Beyond that, my thinking on the subject is not particularly well formed—other than a strong feeling that I believe I know humility when I see it. And that brings us to the remarkable story of Nicholas Winton.

As a young British stockbroker just prior to World War II, Winton quietly carried out one of the most amazing rescue efforts of all time. In late 1938, after visiting Prague and seeing the danger posed by the Nazi occupation to Jewish families, he resolved to get as many children out of Czechoslovakia as possible before the borders closed.

Winton single-handedly formed a relief effort called the Czech Kindertransport. Almost entirely on his own, he did the enormously complicated—and time-consuming—work of identifying imperiled Jewish children, arranging official “transport” papers for them, finding foster families in Britain, raising funds to support the effort, and working his way through the complex legal procedures associated with moving young children from one country to another.

Between March and August 1939, eight trains carried 669 Jewish children to Holland, where they were then ferried to safety in the United Kingdom. A ninth train, scheduled to depart on September 1, 1939, was canceled on the day that war was officially declared—and none of the 250 children who were preparing to depart that day survived the Holocaust.

After the war, Winton said almost nothing about what he’d done, and his story remained largely unknown for a full half-century after his first trip to Prague. In 1988, his wife Grete discovered a massive scrapbook documenting her husband’s efforts. When she alerted Dr. Elizabeth Maxwell, a Holocaust historian and the wife of Robert Maxwell, the British newspaper publisher, Winton strongly resisted public recognition for his efforts, insisting that he’d only done what an extremely dire situation demanded. From this fact alone, you can see how his story is appropriate for a post on the theme of humility.

On February 28, 1988, a story on “The Lost Children” appeared in the Sunday Mirror. After the article appeared, Winton was invited to attend two separate broadcasts of the BBC program That’s Life! Told that the program would be about WWII refugees, he believed he was just another audience member—and when he found himself seated in the front row, he assumed that he was being seated prominently because he was an elderly guest.

During the live taping, host Esther Rantzen surprised Winton when she began to tell his story. After describing a few pages of the long-forgotten scrapbook—which included hundreds of photographs of the children, detailed information about where they came from, and where they were eventually placed—she then revealed that Winton was sitting next to two people whose lives he’d saved. As the two women introduced themselves—and thanked and hugged the man who’d saved their lives—Winton wiped away tears with a handkerchief.

This moving emotional moment then quickly turned into a highly dramatic one when the BBC host asked, “Is there anyone else here tonight who owes their life to Nicholas Winton?” When dozens of people in the nearby seats stood up, Winton was stunned and overwhelmed. You can see it for yourself here:

It took another fourteen years before Winton’s story was brought to an American audience, but in 2002, CBS-TV’s “Sixty Minutes” told an even fuller version of the story (you can see it here ). At one point in the interview, CBS news correspondent Bob Simon said, “A question which I know intrigues everyone who hears your story is, why did you keep it secret for so long?” Winton replied:

“I didn’t really keep it secret; I just didn’t talk about it.”

Earlier in the interview, Winton told Simon that one of his methods for dealing with bureaucratic obstacles was to give himself fake credentials. He took stationery from an established relief organization, The British Committee for Refugees from Czechoslovakia, and simply added “Children’s Section” under the letterhead. By passing himself off as the Chairman of the group, he was able to open doors that would normally be closed to an ordinary citizen. Hearing this, Simon observed about his efforts, “It required quite a bit of ingenuity.” A prideful man would have savored the compliment, but Winton simply said:

“No, it just required a printing press to get the notepaper printed.”

In both of these instances, there was not a trace of pride or arrogance in Winton’s words, making them completely consistent with The Merriam-Webster Dictionary’s definition of humility:

On a personal note, I’m happy I chose humility as a topic this week, because what I found in my research helped to clarify why my previous thinking on the subject was so befuddled.

Humility’s Two Different “Streams” of Thought

Shortly after delving into the topic, it quickly became clear to me that, over the centuries, people have been using the same word—humility—to describe two very different sets of ideas: (1) humility as deferential lowliness, and (2) humility as freedom from pride. I’ll describe these two streams of thought in a moment, but let’s take a look at the word’s etymology first.

According to the American Etymological Dictionary, humility came to English in the early 14th century from the Old French umilité, meaning “humility, modesty, sweetness.” The Old French word, in turn, derived from the Latin humilitas, meaning “lowness, small stature; insignificance; baseness, littleness of mind.” If I may, I’d like to suggest that you read over those eight words one more time. For me, reading them for the first time helped me see that, from the very beginning, the root sense of the word humility was lowliness—and, if anything, it was a special kind of lowliness.

(1) Humility as Deferential Lowliness

In the original Judeo-Christian view, God was clearly above, and humans below—and it was no surprise when this view was expanded to mean masters above-servants below, or superiors above-inferiors below. In this hierarchical world, humble people were not only lowly, they were meek, submissive, deferential, and expected to be obedient to people in authority. To take the sting off their unfortunate situation, the meek and humble masses were schooled to believe that, while their current lives might be characterized by want and scarcity, they could expect to get rewarded in the next life.

As the centuries passed, at least in the Christian tradition, obedience became an even more important component of humility—obedience to God first, and by extension, to earthly authorities. In the 6th century, Saint Benedict made obedience to one’s superiors a central principle of his new order, writing: “The first degree of humility is obedience without delay.” And in the 13th century, Thomas Aquinas echoed Benedict’s words when he wrote in the Summa Contra Gentiles:

“The virtue of humility…consists in keeping oneself within one’s own bounds, not reaching out to things above one, but submitting to one’s superior.”

Words like these make modern readers squirm, but that is the view of humility that held sway for centuries. If we were to describe this stream of thought in modern terms, we might be tempted to view humility as synonymous with low self-esteem. And that, as it turns out, is pretty much what the 1998 edition of the Oxford English Dictionary did:

(2) Humility as Freedom from Pride

Around the Renaissance, thinkers began to look at humility in new ways, completely rejecting the outdated lowliness conception and, even more important, tossing the notion of obedience to authority into the wastebasket of history. To their credit, they retained the core idea of humility-as-the-opposite-of-pride as they began to examine the dynamics of humility with fresh eyes.

In An Introduction to the Devout Life (1609), Francis de Sales, the Catholic Bishop of Geneva, Switzerland, was sharply critical of powerful figures who made a pretense of humility. About them, he wrote:

“Professions of humility are the very cream, the very essence of pride; the really humble man wishes to be, and not to appear so. Humility is timorous, and starts at her shadow; and so delicate that if she hears her name pronounced it endangers her existence.”

The expression the really humble man wishes to be, and not to appear so is not only beautifully phrased, it is psychologically astute. Genuine humility, for de Sales, is an inner condition, not a public performance. The moment humility becomes a cloak one wants to wear, it’s already been corrupted, and that too was eloquently captured by de Sales. About a particular charlatan who craved the reputation of humility, he crafted another immortal line:

“From a principle of pride, he desires to appear humble.”

To my mind, de Sales’s thinking was of pivotal importance in the history of our thinking about humility. First, it firmly established the idea that people who profess humility are not humble, but proud. Second, it introduced the idea that humility is fragile and easily destroyed by a surge of pride. And finally, he helped shift humility away from outward demeanor and toward an inner orientation, anticipating later psychological thinking that viewed humility as a subset of emotional maturity or emotional intelligence.

As the centuries progressed, modern psychology significantly modified the freedom-from-pride notion, changing it to freedom from preoccupation with the self. To understand this in real time, simply go back and review how Nicholas Winton replied to Bob Simon’s queries. Neither comment had a let’s-talk-more-about-me-and-how-great-I-am quality—the essence of a preoccupation with self.

Here’s the modern psychological conception of humility.

The APA definition reflects a genuine shift in how humility is understood. In this new framing, humility no longer means lowliness, but rather a lowered focus on the self. The new conception is completely compatible with one of Albert Einstein’s most important observations:

It’s also consistent with our Mystery Man’s Puzzler quotation: it’s not about thinking less of yourself, but about being less preoccupied with yourself and less consumed with how you’re coming across to other people. In this view, overestimating and underestimating oneself are treated as equal errors; what matters is accuracy of self-assessment.

This reconceptualization also explains how humility can coexist with confidence. People can know they performed well without needing the accomplishment to define them. Humility, in this view, becomes a part of overall psychological health. It’s not about shrinking the self, but rather putting the self in a proper perspective—present, capable, and not feeling the compulsion to be at the center of every stage.

Thanks for indulging me this week. Because of the Nicholas Winton story, I went on a little longer than I would’ve liked, but I think it was worth it. And this won’t be my only step up to the plate. Humility is a rich and fertile topic, and I look forward to exploring it further in future posts on pride , false humility, humblebragging, and who knows what else.

This week, take a few moments to think about what the word humility means to you. As usual, let your thinking be stimulated by the following compilation of quotations on the subject:

• Nothing is more deceitful than the appearance of humility. It is often only carelessness of opinion, and sometimes an indirect boast.‬ — Jane Austen

• All politicians are humble, and seldom let you forget it. They go around the country boasting about their humility. They are proud of their humility. Many are downright arrogant about their humility and insist that it qualifies them to be President. —Russell Baker

• The wisest man is he who does not fancy that he is so at all. —Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux

• Humility has its origin in an awareness of unworthiness, and sometimes too in a dazzled awareness of saintliness. —Colette (Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette)

• In times of crisis, we think we need to rely on the expertise of our leaders. We don’t. We need to rely on the humility of our leaders. —Malcolm Gladwell

• Real excellence and humility are consequently not incompatible one with the other; on the contrary, they are twin sisters. —Jean Baptiste Lacordaire

• In artful boasting, one states all the information necessary to impress people, but keeps the facts decently clothed in the language of humility. — Judith Martin (“Miss Manners”)

• Genuine humility does not arise from the sense of our pitiable kinship with the dust that is unworthy of us but from the realization of an awful nearness to a magnificence of which we are unworthy. — Alistair Maclean

• The greatest minds are marked by nothing more distinctly than an inconceivable humility, and acceptance of work or instruction in any form, and from any quarter. They will learn from everybody, and do anything that anybody asks, so long as it involves only toil, or what other men would think degradation. — John Ruskin

• We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility. — Rabindranath Tagore

For source information on these quotations, and others on the topic of HUMILITY, go here.

Cartoons of the Week

Answer to This Week’s Puzzler:

Rick Warren

Dr. Mardy’s Observation of the Week:

Thanks for joining me again this week. See you next Sunday morning, when the theme will be “Loss.”

Mardy Grothe

Websites: www.drmardy.com and www.GreatOpeningLines.com

Regarding My Lifelong Love of Quotations: A Personal Note