Mote

The mote (Greek karphos, meaning a dry piece of straw, chaff, or splinter) appears in Jesus' teaching on judgmentalism in the Sermon on the Mount and its parallel in Luke 6 (Matt. 7:3–5; Luke 6:41–42). Jesus uses the contrast between a mote (a tiny particle of dust or wood) lodged in another person's eye and a beam or plank (dokos) lodged in one's own eye to expose the hypocrisy of harsh critics who are blind to far greater faults in themselves. The vivid absurdity of the image — someone with a log in their eye trying to remove a speck from their neighbor's — makes it one of the most memorable of Jesus' rhetorical illustrations. The teaching does not forbid all moral discernment but insists on self-examination before correcting others. The word "mote" has become an English idiom for any trivially small fault or flaw.