Humility is a strange thing. The moment you think you’ve got it, you’ve lost it.

The saying is presented as a paradox about humility: once a person becomes self-conscious and takes pride in being humble, the humility is undermined. The earliest located appearance in the provided article is a 1938 compilation where it is printed without any credited author, and later it circulates widely in newspapers, religious publications, and quote collections, sometimes with named attributions.

The line warns that humility cannot be possessed as a status symbol. If you start congratulating yourself for being humble, that self-satisfaction turns into a form of pride, which contradicts humility itself.

Humility is that strange thing that the moment you think you have it, you have lost it.

Humility is a strange thing—the moment you think you have it, you have lost it.

Humility is a strange thing. The minute you think you’ve got it, you’ve lost it.

Humility is that which when you know you have it you’ve lost it.