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Humility

Humility refers to the fact of being aware of your flaws, of your weakness, of your inadequacy.

Humility prevents us from being too arrogant (see pride).

Being humble doesn’t mean ignoring what we are, it means acknowledging what we’re not.

We often tend to consider humility as a great quality and to consider pride, its antonym, as something negative, like a flaw. We say that someone who isn’t humble enough that they’re arrogant. However, those two values can be moderated : humility is a good thing, but being too humble and constantly lowering yourself can harm your self-confidence (cf self-confidence), and we need pride to acknowledge our own capabilities and accomplishments.

Also, someone who’s bragging about being humble isn’t really humble since the act of bragging does not correspond to humility and discretion about one’s qualities.

According to Spinoza, humility is a form of sadness created by Humans’ awareness of their own flaws and weaknesses. We can interpret that by saying that being humble is seeing yourself as full of flaws and less capable than someone else of accomplishing your goals.

Being humble is also acknowledging that there will always be someone better than you.

Humility can also refer to poverty. An humble individual is a poor person, or someone who made the choice of not living in luxury even if they can afford it, to live a simple life and not to brag about their wealth (see wealth).