Humility is reversed pride. It’s the pride of being seen as humble, as a person without pride.

Arrogant people think they are better than you for their achievements. Humble people think they are better than arrogant people. One is in the open, another hides very well, but there’s no difference.

If you tell a humble person that he is insufficiently humble or arrogant, he will not be pleased with you. On some level, he thinks humility is an achievement in itself, on top of his other achievements.

For how can one be humble if one hasn’t achieved anything? It’s not possible. Can you imagine a humble toddler? What would he be humble about? So we all know, on some level, that humility is hiding your achievement, hiding your pride. We just don’t want to admit it because then we can no longer label humility as something “good” and arrogance as something “bad”, and that would be no fun at all.

A toddler is neither arrogant nor humble. True, authentic humility can only be known in returning to this nascent, pure state, and since it cannot be seen, it will be perceived as either humility or arrogance depending on who’s looking at it. So it can hardly be called “humility”, it is neither. It’s not the opposite of pride, it’s the opposite of vanity. Both humility and arrogance are vanity, just the opposite expressions of it. So a much better word for it would be “surrender”.