Daily Inspiration Quote by Pope John XXIII

Self-erasure can be its own kind of shelter. When Pope John XXIII says, "The feelings of my smallness and my nothingness always kept me good company", he turns what sounds like negation into companionship: not a wound, but a steadying presence. The line works because it refuses the modern demand that confidence be loud. Instead, he frames humility as a practice with texture and warmth, something you can live alongside, not merely endure.

As a cleric formed by Catholic spiritual tradition, John XXIII is drawing on an old discipline: shrinking the ego so something larger can enter the room. "Smallness" and "nothingness" echo monastic and mystical language (the self as dust; the soul as an empty vessel) without tipping into despair. The key phrase is "good company", which recasts self-knowledge as relational. He is not bragging about humility; he is admitting that awareness of his limits was a constant companion that kept him from the loneliness of self-importance.

The subtext is leadership, and specifically the peril of spiritual authority. Popes are surrounded by pageantry that can easily confuse office with sanctity. John XXIII, remembered for convening the Second Vatican Council and projecting a disarming warmth, signals a counterweight to institutional grandeur: an interior insistence that power is borrowed. In a century defined by ideological strongmen and totalizing certainties, the remark reads as a quiet rebuke. Nothingness, here, is not annihilation; it is ballast.