Humility is acquired after struggles. When you know yourself you acquire humility, which becomes a (permanent) condition. Otherwise you can become humble for a moment, but your thought will say to you that you are something, although in reality you’re nothing; and you’ll be deluded like that to the moment of death. If death finds you with the thought that you are nothing, then God will speak. If, however, your thought says at the hour of death that you are something and you don’t understand it, all your effort goes to waste.

—St Paisios of Mount Athos