Humility (Descriptions)

"Belief in the power of God, plus enough willingness, honesty and humility to establish and maintain the new order of things, were the essential requirements." Big Book, Page 13-4, Bill's Story

Big Book:

"They took inventory all right, but hung on to some of the worst items in stock. They only thought they had lost their egoism and fear; they only thought they humbled themselves. But they had not learned enough of humility, fearlessness and honesty, in the sense we find it necessary, until they told someone else all their life story."
Big Book, Page 73, Into Action, Step Five

12 & 12:

“If temperamentally we are on the depressive side, we are apt to be swamped with guilt and self-loathing. We wallow in this messy bog, often getting a misshapen and painful pleasure out of it. As we morbidly pursue this melancholy activity, we may sink to such a point of despair that nothing but oblivion looks possible as a solution. Here, of course, we have lost all perspective, and therefore all genuine humility.”
Page 45, Step Four

“Where other people were concerned, we had to drop the word ‘blame’ from speech and thought. This required great willingness even to begin. But once over the first two or three high hurdles, the course ahead began to look easier. For we had started to gain perspective on ourselves, which is another way of saying we were gaining in humility .”
Page 48, Step Four

“Another great dividend we may expect from confiding our defects to another human being is humility – a word often misunderstood. To those of us who have made progress in A.A., it amounts to a clear recognition of what and who we are, followed by a sincere attempt to become what we could be.”
Page 58, Step Five

“In all these strivings, so many of them well-intentioned, our crippling handicap had been our lack of humility. We had lacked the perspective to see that character-building and spiritual values had to come first, and that material satisfactions were not the purpose of living.”
Page 71, Step Seven

“As long as we placed self-reliance first, a genuine reliance upon a Higher Power was out of the question. That basic ingredient of all humility, a desire to seek and do God’s will, was missing.”
Page 72, Step Seven

“In every case, pain had been the price of admission into a new way of life. But this admission price had purchased more than we expected. It brought a measure of humility, which we soon discovered to be a healer of pain. We began to fear pain less and desire humility more than ever.”
Page 75, Step Seven

"Even the chief architect [of a group's failed attempt at outside enterprises], standing in the ruins of his dream, could laugh at himself - and that is the very acme of humility."
Page 149, Tradition Four