Vinoba Bhave Quotes

I think we should all be servants. To be really great in God's eyes is to be least among each other and serve each other.

Jesus specialized in menial tasks that everyone else tried to avoid: washing feet, helping children, fixing breakfast, and serving lepers. Nothing was beneath him, because he came to serve.

To learn true humility, we need more than a redefinition of greatness; we need even more than Jesus' personal example of humble service. What we need is His death.

It's important if you can do good with power. And Jesus defined power, true power is to serve, to do service, to do the most humble services, and I must still make progress on this path of service because I feel that I don't do everything I should do. That's the sense I have of power.

I want to be aware of how I treat others, not thinking too highly of myself to be a servant in a culture which tries to place me on a throne that only God should sit.

Love is the only thing that counts. Love is what keeps the star and the human beings and the world turning around. Love is the force that binds the whole universe together.

Study and know that we are always a student of the craft well after we've completed any course of study... and approach the work as a servant, not a star.

In the kingdom, the greater our responsibilities, the greater is our need to see ourselves as servants.

We are social creatures to the inmost centre of our being. The notion that one can begin anything at all from scratch, free from the past, or unindebted to others, could not conceivably be more wrong.

The Christian knows to serve the weak not because they deserve it but because God extended his love to us when we deserved the opposite. Christ came down from heaven, and whenever his disciples entertained dreams of prestige and power he reminded them that the greatest is the one who serves. The ladder of power reaches up, the ladder of grace reaches down.

How does humility manifest itself in leadership and in life? A humble person is more concerned about what is right than about being right, about acting on good ideas than having the ideas, about embracing new truth than defending outdated position, about building the team than exalting self, about recognizing contribution than being recognized for making it.

You can try reading books that will help you be a leader, like Marshall Rosenberg and Thich Nhat Hanh. Be very humble and say, "I don't know why. I don't feel qualified, but I accept this role that you gave me, and so help me."

And in the case of superior things like stars, we discover a kind of unity in separation. The higher we rise on the scale of being, the easier it is to discern a connection even among things separated by vast distances.

The first step to leadership is servanthood.

The best leaders are humble enough to realize their victories depend upon their people.

Above all, leadership is a position of servanthood.

As a believer just because you gain more fame or authority doesn't mean anything, this means you have more feet to wash

You know what music is? God's little reminder that there's something else besides us in this universe; harmonic connection between all living beings, every where, even the stars.

I believe that the universe is one being, all its parts are different expressions of the same energy... parts of one organic whole.... (This is physics, I believe, as well as religion.) The parts change and pass, or die, people and races and rocks and stars; none of them seems to me important in itself, but only the whole. This whole is in all its parts so beautiful, and is felt by me to be so intensely in earnest, that I am compelled to love it, and to think of it as divine.

Men and Women of Christ magnify their callings without magnifying themselves.

For great are you, Lord, and you look kindly on what is humble, but the lofty-minded you regard from afar. Only to those whose hearts are crushed do you draw close. You will not let yourself be found by the proud, nor even by those who in their inquisitive skill count stars or grains of sand, or measure the expanses of heaven, or trace the paths of the planets.

Jesus humbled himself. He went from commanding angels to sleeping in the straw. From holding stars to clutching Mary's finger. The palm that held the universe took the nail of a soldier. Why? Because that's what love does. It puts the beloved before itself.

It is no secret. All power is one in source and end, I think. Years and distances, stars and candles, water and wind and wizardry, the craft in a man's hand and the wisdom in a tree's root: they all arise together. My name, and yours, and the true name of the sun, or a spring of water, or an unborn child, all are syllables of the great word that is very slowly spoken by the shining of the stars. There is no other power. No other name.

I keep God first. He me to go out and act and be humble and keep it simple. God gave me this gift to bless the world. That's what I'm here to do.

When you start thinking you're a big shot, you wash more feet.