John Owen Quotes

Men are never duly touched and impressed with a conviction of their insignificance, until they have contrasted themselves with the majesty of God

Man is never sufficiently touched and affected by the awareness of his lowly state until he has compared himself with God's majesty.

Man's sin is in his failure to live what he is. Being the master of the earth, man forgets that he is the servant of God.

The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be wretched. A tree does not know itself to be wretched.

Judge yourself; if you do that you will not be judged by God, as St. Paul says. But it must be a real sense of your own sinfulness, not an artificial humility.

Our age-old faith in divine male intuition is no longer good enough. Reality check, fellas: We are not gods. We are men. Let's own it.

Humility is honestly assessing ourselves in light of God’s holiness and our sinfulness.

For a much lauded writer, I'm not terribly self-absorbed. In social situations, which are difficult for me - I mean, this is an interview - I'm normally uncomfortable talking about myself.

Judge yourself; if you sincerely and humbly do that, you will not be judged by God.

Let us fall before the majesty of our great God, acknowledging our faults, and praying that he will make us ever more conscious of them.

Am I getting nobler, better, more helpful, more humble, as I get older? Am I exhibiting the life that men take knowledge of as having been with Jesus, or am I getting more self-assertive, more deliberately determined to have my own way? It is a great thing to tell yourself the truth.

I know that's a little jarring, coming from a Weatherman, but what I mean by being humble is doubting if your action did anything. So you have to open your eyes, act and doubt. And then you have to repeat for a lifetime.

The greatness of God is the true rebuke to the littleness of men. The greatness of Christ is the true rebuke to the littleness of Christians.

I can talk about humility, but I'm not humble. I mean, if you say, I'm humble, you've just contradicted yourself. But I'm trying to be, man, I'm trying so hard.

Now repentance is no fun at all. It is something much harder than merely eating humble pie. It means unlearning all the self-conceit and self-will that we have been training ourselves into for thousands of years. It means undergoing a kind of death. In fact, it needs a good man to repent. And here's the catch. Only a bad person needs to repent: only a good person can repent perfectly. The worse you are the more you need it and the less you can do it. The only person who could do it perfectly would be a perfect person - and he would not need it.

To seek yourself in this world is to be lost; and to be humble is to be exalted.

Do not try to be humble: learn humility.

One of Nadal’s strengths is that he’s so humble, that he’s surprised at what he has achieved, and that he has never bought into his greatness.

A great man la an abstraction of some one excellence; but whoever fancies himself an abstraction of excellence, so far from being great, may be sure that he is a blockhead, equally ignorant of excellence or defect of himself or others.

Keep up a humble sense of your own faults, and that will make you compassionate to others

The humble man makes room for progress; the proud man believes he is already there.

Be humble like Mary so that you can be holy like Jesus

It is dangerous to explain too clearly to man how like he is to the animals without pointing out his greatness. It is also dangerous to make too much of his greatness without his vileness. It is still more dangerous to leave him in ignorance of both, but it is most valuable to represent both to him. Man must not be allowed to believe that he is equal either to animals or to angels, nor to be unaware of either, but he must know both.

You are different from the really great man in only one thing: The great man, at one time, also was a very little man, but he developed one important ability: he learned to see where he was small in his thinking, and actions. Under the pressure of some task which was dear to him he learned better and better to sense the threat that comes from his smallness and pettiness. The great man, then, knows when and in what he is a little man.

Being an adult, you've already suffered enough from your own mistakes, and the world, to come to this as a humble human being. So it's not like, "I'm going to do the right thing because it advances me," as much as it's like, "I'm going to do the right thing because this puts me closest to the dream I had as a 10-year-old kid."