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“I believe the first test of a truly great man is his humility.”
Ruskin defines greatness without self-worship: genuine ability can be recognized accurately while still being held inside a larger sense of proportion, dependence and responsibility.
Source note: Modern Painters, Volume III, Part IV, Chapter XVI, section 24, Project Gutenberg #38923. Ruskin immediately clarifies that humility does not mean doubt of one’s real power or hesitation about one’s opinions; it means understanding those powers in relation to a much larger world.
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“God resisteth the proud, but giveth grace unto the humble.”
Pride is treated as a barrier while humility is presented as a posture open to correction, help, and grace.
Source note: James 4:6 in the King James Version.
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“Pride goeth before destruction, and an haughty spirit before a fall.”
The proverb treats pride as a warning sign that can blind judgment before a serious mistake.
Source note: Proverbs 15:1 in the King James Version; the proverb contrasts a soft answer with speech that intensifies wrath.
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“Humility—to put a seal upon your lips and forget what you have done.”
Drummond defines humility as allowing good work to remain larger than the ego that performed it: kindness is followed by a refusal to turn the act into self-advertisement or private self-congratulation.
Source note: “The Greatest Thing in the World,” in The Greatest Thing in the World and Other Addresses, Project Gutenberg #16739. Drummond explicitly places Humility among the “ingredients” of Christian love and glosses it as love that does not vaunt itself.
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“There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.”
Voice: Narrator voice · Narrator
Greatness is stripped of spectacle and measured instead by moral clarity, goodness, and freedom from unnecessary complication.
Source note: War and Peace; the narrator’s judgment of greatness appears in the novel’s discussion of Kutuzov, simplicity, goodness and truth.
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“Give thanks unto God for His grace, but for thyself alone confess thy fault.”
The sentence separates gratitude from self-congratulation: what is received as grace is answered with thanks, while personal failure remains something to examine rather than disguise with spiritual pride.
Source note: The Imitation of Christ, Book II, Chapter X, William Benham translation, Project Gutenberg #1653. This is part of a longer argument opposing ingratitude and pride; this collection preserves its Christian theological framework.