Humility & Openness

If the public thought elevates you above the generality of men, let the other humble you, and hold you in a perfect equality with all mankind, for this is your natural condition.

Blaise Pascal Pensées

[Seneca] would have denounced the opinion to which most philosophers, tacitly or otherwise, have come round in the last half-century, that it is no part of the business of philosophy to turn people into better persons, as tantamount to desertion or lèse-majesté.

Seneca Moral Letters to Lucilius

Any one thing in the creation is sufficient to demonstrate a Providence to an humble and grateful mind.

Epictetus Discourses & Enchiridion

Ηe knew nothing except just the fact of his ignorance. • Alternate translation: I know nothing except the fact of my ignorance.

Socrates Apology (via Plato)

The wisdom which knows what are and are not dangers is opposed to the ignorance of them

Plato The Republic & Dialogues

For the things we have to learn before we can do, we learn by doing.

Aristotle Nicomachean Ethics

Virtuous, worthy, wise and capable people are chosen as leaders.

Confucius The Analects (Lunyu)

Go to the people. Live with them. Learn from them. Love them. Start with what they know. Build with what they have. With the best leaders when the work is done, the task accomplished, the people will say, "We have done this ourselves.

Laozi Tao Te Ching

Thus, the wise man looks into space, and does not regard the small as too little, nor the great as too much; for he knows that there is no limit to dimension.

Zhuangzi Zhuangzi

Our caravan leader is the pride of the world, Mustafa [Muhammad]

Rumi Masnavi & Divan-e Shams

He who humbleth himself wants to be exalted.

Friedrich Nietzsche Thus Spoke Zarathustra & Beyond Good and Evil

The question is asked in ignorance, by one who does not even know what can have led him to ask it.

Søren Kierkegaard Either/Or & Journals

The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable.

Arthur Schopenhauer Parerga and Paralipomena

A wise man never loses anything, if he has himself.

Michel de Montaigne Essais

Likewise, there is much truth in Voltaire's enthusiastic Orientalist assumption that unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam, the Indian and Chinese "religions" were not based on prophetic "revelations" but on a purely human contemplation of reality.

Voltaire Candide & Philosophical Dictionary

People do not argue with the teaching of George; they simply do not know it. And it is impossible to do otherwise with his teaching, for he who becomes acquainted with it cannot but agree.

Leo Tolstoy War and Peace & A Calendar of Wisdom

Of one that lov'd not wisely but too well.

William Shakespeare First Folio & Sonnets

As I slowly grow wise I briskly grow cautious.

Mark Twain Notebooks & Autobiography

We, as we read," Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in an essay on history, "must become Greeks, Romans, Turks, priest and king, martyr and executioner; must fasten these images to some reality in our secret experience, or we shall learn nothing rightly.

Ralph Waldo Emerson Essays: First and Second Series

You must ascend a mountain to learn your relation to matter, and so to your own body, for it is at home there, though you are not.

Henry David Thoreau Walden

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever.

Mahatma Gandhi The Story of My Experiments with Truth

It is in the character of growth that we should learn from both pleasant and unpleasant experiences.

Nelson Mandela Long Walk to Freedom

Children's talent to endure stems from their ignorance of alternatives.

Maya Angelou I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings & Essays

I believe the main task of the spirit is to free man from his ego.

Albert Einstein Ideas and Opinions

Those at too great a distance may, I am well aware, mistake ignorance for perspective.

Carl Sagan Cosmos & Pale Blue Dot

We come nearest to the great when we are great in humility.

Rabindranath Tagore Gitanjali & Stray Birds