Abasement Quotes

• Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Humility, Self, Opposites

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• But self-abasement is just inverted egoism. Anyone who acts with genuine humility will be as far from humiliation as from arrogance.

  Stephen Mitchell

  Humility, Self, Arrogance

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• Abasement, degradation is simply the manner of life of the man who has refused to be what it is his duty to be.

  Jose Ortega y Gasset

  Frustration, Men, Aggravation

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• There exists, at the bottom of all abasement and misfortune, a last extreme which rebels and joins battle with the forces of law and respectability in a desperate struggle, waged partly by cunning and partly by violence, at once sick and ferocious, in which it attacks the prevailing social order with the pin-pricks of vice and the hammer-blows of crime.

  Victor Hugo

  Depression, Struggle, Blow

  Victor Hugo (1980). “Les misérables”, Viking Pr

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• The social principles of Christianity preach cowardice, self-contempt, abasement, submission, humility, in a word all the qualities of the canaille

  Karl Marx

  Humility, Self, Quality

  Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels (1963). “The Communist manifesto of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels”

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• If love is the soul of Christian existence, it must be at the heart of every other Christian virtue. Thus, for example, justice without love is legalism; faith without love is ideology; hope without love is self-centeredness; forgiveness without love is self-abasement; fortitude without love is recklessness; generosity without love is extravagance; care without love is mere duty; fidelity without love is servitude. Every virtue is an expression of love. No virtue is really a virtue unless it is permeated, or informed, by love.

  Richard Rohr

  Love, Christian, Heart

  321 Copy quote

• It belongs to small-mindedness to be unable to bear either honor or dishonor, either good fortune or bad, but to be filled with conceit when honored and puffed up by trifling good fortune, and to be unable to bear even the smallest dishonor and to deem any chance failure a great misfortune, and to be distressed and annonyed at everything. Moreover the small-minded man is the sort of person to call all slights an insult and dishonor, even those that are due to ignorance or forgetfulness. Small-mindedness is accompanied by pettiness, querulousness, pessimism and self-abasement.

  Aristotle

  Ignorance, Men, Self

  35 Copy quote

• Should prosperity befall thee, rejoice not, and should abasement come upon thee, grieve not, for both shall pass away and be no more.

  Bahá'u'lláh

  Grieving, Passing Away, Prosperity

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• The Negro does not want love. He wants justice . . . I believe it would be better for the Negro's soul to be seared with hate than dwarfed by self-abasement.

  E. Franklin Frazier

  Hate, Believe, Self

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• Independence is the recognition of the fact that yours is the responsibility of judgment and nothing can help you escape it-that no substitute can do your thinking, as no pinch-hitter can live your life-that the vilest form of self-abasement and self-destruction is the subordination of your mind to the mind of another, the acceptance of an authority over your brain, the acceptance of his assertions as facts, his say-so as truth, his edicts as middle-man between your consciousness and your existence.

  Ayn Rand

  Responsibility, Acceptance, Men

  Ayn Rand (1988). “The Ayn Rand Lexicon: Objectivism from A to Z”, p.225, Penguin

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• There was no mistaking her sincerity--it breathed in every tone of her voice. Both Marilla and Mrs. Lynde recognized its unmistakable ring. But the former understood in dismay that Anne was actually enjoying her valley of humiliation--was reveling in the thoroughness of her abasement. Where was the wholesome punishment upon which she, Marilla, had plumed herself? Anne had turned it into a species of positive pleasure.

  Lucy Maud Montgomery

  Punishment, Voice, Valleys

  Lucy Maud Montgomery (2015). “Anne of Green Gables Collection: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of the Island, and More Anne Shirley Books”, p.67, Xist Publishing

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• Urging humans to be superhumans, on pain of death and torture, is the urging of terrible self-abasement at their repeated and inevitable failure to keep the rules.

  Christopher Hitchens

  Atheist, Pain, Self

  Christopher Hitchens (2011). “God is Not Great”, p.152, Atlantic Books Ltd

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• According to the spirit of this age, the ultimate sin is no longer the failure to honor and thank God but the failure to esteem oneself. Self-abasement, not God-abasement, is the evil. And the cry of deliverance is not "O wretched man that I am, who will deliver me?" but "O worthy man that I am, would that I could only see it better"!

  John Piper

  Self Esteem, Men, Evil

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• Pride is a terrible and dangerous thing. It can take so many forms; it can even assume the appearance of humility. Pride can lead not only to self-exaltation, but also to self-abasement. The key to battling pride is not found in struggling against thinking too highly of ourselves or in striving to think of ourselves as lowly. The key is found in simply not thinking about ourselves at all, but setting our minds on Christ and the needs of others.

  Paul Washer

  Struggle, Humility, Pride

  Source: m.blogs.christianpost.com

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• Unless a man gives himself entirely to the Cross, in a spirit of humility and self-abasement; unless he casts himself down to be trampled underfoot by all and despised, accepting injustice, contempt and mockery; unless he undergoes all these things with joy for the sake of the Lord, not claiming any kind of human reward whatsoever - glory or honor or earthly pleasures - he cannot become a true Christian.

  Mark the Evangelist

  Christian, Humility, Men

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• Yet we slink about like whipped curs:;... our self-abasement principally takes the form of subservience to the United States:;... we are under no necessity to participate in the American nightmare of a Soviet monster barely held at bay in all quarters of the globe by an inconceivable nuclear armament and by political intervention everywhere from Poland to Cambodia. It is the Americans who need us in order to act out their crazy scenario... We simply do not need to go chasing up and down after the vagaries of the next ignoramus to become President of the United States.

  Enoch Powell

  Crazy, Self, Order

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• Mary lived in the divine Eucharist, the center of her love. All her thoughts, words, and actions sprang from It like the rays from the sun. The Eucharist was the oracle which she consulted, the grace which she followed. But Jesus Christ in His Sacrament lives the same life of love which consumed Him in His mortal days. In His sacramental state He continues to adore His Father by His depthless self-abasement. He is still the Mediator and Interceder with divine goodness for the salvation of men

  Peter Julian Eymard

  Jesus, Father, Men

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• ... We in the USA have been depending on prayers, pleading, and self-abasement to a deity to bring us magical advantages, and have been encouraged to attribute our prosperity and general success among nations, to that sort of action. In my opinion, hard work and dedication to logic and reason ought to be recognized as the reasons for our achievements, not appeals to a mythical friend-in-the-sky. We got where we are in spite of, not because of, those incantations.

  James Randi

  Prayer, Hard Work, Dedication

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• There are times when I, without willing it, mount to the height of contemplation; with my will I am drawn down from it because of the limitations of human nature and [find] safety in abasement. I know many things that are unknown to most men, yet I am more ignorant than all others. I rejoice because Christ, 'whom I have believed' (II Tim. 1:12), has bestowed on me an eternal and unshakable kingdom, yet I constantly weep as one who is unworthy of that which is above, and I cease not.

  Symeon the New Theologian

  Christian, Men, Safety

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• I have grown weary of literature: silence alone comforts me. If I continue to write, it’s because I have nothing more to accomplish in this world except to wait for death. Searching for the word in darkness. Any little success invades me and puts me in full view of everyone. I long to wallow in the mud. I can scarcely control my need for self-abasement, my craving for licentiousness and debauchery. Sin tempts me, forbidden pleasures lure me. I want to be both pig and hen, then kill them and drink their blood.

  Clarice Lispector

  Writing, Pigs, Self

  Clarice Lispector (1986). “The Hour of the Star”, p.70, New Directions Publishing

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• Great winds and storms help fruit-bearing trees. So also do corruptions and temptations help the fruitfulness of grace and holiness. The storm loosens the earth round its roots so the tree is able to get its roots deeper into the earth, where it receives fresh supplies of nourishment. But only much later will it be seen to bring forth better fruit. So corruptions and temptations develop the roots of humility, self-abasement and mourning in a deeper search for that grace by which holiness grows strong. But only later will there be visible fruits of increased holiness.

  John Owen

  Strong, Humility, Self

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• Tis immortality, 'tis that alone, Amid life's pains, abasements, emptiness, The soul can comfort, elevate, and fill. That only, and that amply this performs.

  Edward Young

  Pain, Soul, Comfort

  Edward Young, Charles Edward DE COETLOGON (1803). “Night Thoughts ... With notes ... by the Rev. C. E. de Coetlogon ... To which are added the author's poem on the Last Day, the paraphrase on part of the Book of Job [with other poems], and his life”, p.172

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• Humility is just as much the opposite of self-abasement as it is of self-exaltation. To be humble is not to make comparisons. Secure in its reality, the self is neither better nor worse, bigger nor smaller, than anything else in the universe. It is ? is nothing, yet at the same time one with everything. It is in this sense that humility is absolute self-effacement.

  Dag Hammarskjold

  Humble, Humility, Reality

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