A humble human being merges with God through self-renunciation.
There is nothing gentler and more pliable in the world than water, and yet the hard and the rigid cannot withstand it. The weak defeats the strong. The soft defeats the hard. Everyone in the world knows this, but no one wants to put it into practice.
— Laozi
The one who wrestles with his circumstances will find that his circumstances will wrestle with him in turn, but the one who yields to them will find that they will yield to him.
When you see that your circumstances are not in your favor, do not struggle against them but let them follow their natural course, because the one who goes against circumstances becomes their slave, and the one who submits to them becomes their master.
— The Talmud
When a sage follows the law of virtue, he hides it from the eyes of the people and does not regret that no one knows about him.
— Confucius
Saadi tells us that in the land of the Parthians he met a man riding atop a tiger. “When I saw this I was so paralyzed with terror that I could neither run nor move from where I stood. But this man said to me: ‘Saadi, don’t be surprised by what you see. As long as you do not try to free your neck from the yoke of God, nothing will have the power to free its neck from your yoke.’”
The human being is very powerful when he wants to be only that which he is, and very weak when he wants to rise above humankind.
— Rousseau
By perfecting himself in humility, it is as if the human being is descending from the top of a cone down to its base. The further he descends, the wider the circle of his spiritual life becomes.
The weakest in the world defeat the strongest: that is why humility is so advantageous and why silence is so beneficial. Very few in the world are capable of being humble.
— Laozi
The more humble a human being is, the freer and more powerful he is.
