Charity Quotes

“The Gospel takes away our right forever, to discriminate between the deserving and the undeserving poor.”
― Dorothy Day

“True confidence is not about what you take from someone to restore yourself, but what you give back to your critics because they need it more than you do.”
― Shannon L. Alder

“Don’t we get it? To put our arm around someone who is gay, someone who has an addiction, somebody who lives a different lifestyle, someone who is not what we think they should be… doing that has nothing to do with enabling them or accepting what they do as okay by us. It has nothing to do with encouraging them in their practice of what you or I might feel or believe is wrong vs right.

It has everything to do with being a good human being. A good person. A good friend.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself.

Know that a well-honed sense of justice is a measure of personal experience, and all experience is a measure of self.

Know that the highest expression of justice is mercy.

Thus, as the supreme judge in your own court, you must have compassion for yourself.

Otherwise, cede your gavel.”
― Vera Nazarian, The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration

“So may the New Year be a happy one to you, happy to many more whose happiness depends on you!”
― Charles Dickens, The Chimes

“In a world plagued with commonplace tragedies, only one thing exists that truly has the power to save lives, and that is love.”
― Richelle Goodrich, Dandelions: The Disappearance of Annabelle Fancher

“Kindness is a magical spell—performed by enlightened beings—meant to enchant hearts and lift weary souls that they might fly.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“But charity is the PURE LOVE OF CHRIST, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.
Moroni 7”
― The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, The Book of Mormon: Another Testament of Jesus Christ

“Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.”
― Wilhelm Reich, Listen, Little Man!

“You know, that man has a spirit, that each man and woman is unique, that we have duty to promote our unalienable rights and to protect them, that we have a duty to our families and ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to contribute to charity, that we have a duty to support a just and righteous law that is stable and predictable.”
― Mark R. Levin

“That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be
generous.”
― George Gissing

“I interviewed my dad on video in his final weeks. When I asked about his work and finding meaning through helping others, he responded, "I don't think you can be focused on, 'Oh gee, I want to make a difference.' It has to be spontaneous. If it's not...there's some kind of egotistical thing going on. That's a red flag. You hope you impact people on the deepest level you are capable of at the time. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. You're trying.”
― Lisa Shannon, A Thousand Sisters: My Journey into the Worst Place on Earth to Be a Woman

“I think it doesn’t matter if you or I or anybody else thinks homosexuality is a sin. It doesn’t matter if you or I think anything is a sin. It doesn’t matter if homosexuality is a sin or not. In fact, it doesn’t matter if anything anybody else does is a sin or not.

Because sin is a very personal thing! It always has been and it always will be!

And it has nothing to do with love.”
― Dan Pearce, Single Dad Laughing: The Best of Year One

“There are two missions we are obligated to carry out during our life journey. The first, is to seek Truth throughout our lifetime. The second, is simply to be good. Engrave it in your mind that life is just one big board game where you have to make it from start to finish by being good. That is all you have to do. The hardest part, is dealing with all the obstacles that prevent smooth sailing. The trick is, to always strive to be the right person in all situations – regardless of personal cost to you. Your aim is to make sure the right book on your shoulder weighs more that the bad book on the left. The scales are real. Regardless of your chosen faith, there is a measurement system to be found in all of the world's religions. After all, does it make sense for all souls, good or bad, to end up in the same place? Of course not. To really secure the very best setting in the afterlife, the vibrations of your good deeds must surpass your death.”
― Suzy Kassem, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

“Miranda nods, because she knows that to be true: noble people don't do things for the money, they simply have money, and that's what allows they to be noble. They don't really have to think about it much; they sprout benevolent acts the way trees sprout leaves.”
― Margaret Atwood, Hag-Seed

“What a rich wisdom it would be, and how much more bountiful a harvest, to gain pleasure not from achieving personal perfection but from understanding the inevitability of imperfection and pardoning those who also fall short of it.”
― Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder

“... love for our neighbours does not die the minute we enter heaven, it intensifies.”
― E.A. Bucchianeri, Brushstrokes of a Gadfly

“Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.”
― C.S. Lewis.

“The charity that hastens to proclaim its good deeds, ceases to be charity, and is only pride and ostentation.”
― William Hutton

“I have often wondered, Sir, [. . .] to observe so few Instances of Charity among Mankind; for tho' the Goodness of a Man's Heart did not incline him to relieve the Distresses of his Fellow-Creatures, methinks the Desire of Honour should move him to it. What inspires a Man to build fine Houses, to purchase fine Furniture, Pictures, Clothes, and other things at a great Expence, but an Ambition to be respected more than other People? Now would not one great Act of Charity, one Instance of redeeming a poor Family from all the Miseries of Poverty, restoring an unfortunate Tradesman by a Sum of Money to the means of procuring a Livelihood by his Industry, discharging an undone Debtor from his Debts or a Goal, or any such Example of Goodness, create a Man more Honour and Respect than he could acquire by the finest House, Furniture, Pictures or Clothes that were ever beheld? For not only the Object himself who was thus relieved, but all who heard the Name of such a Person must, I imagine, reverence him infinitely more than the Possessor of all those other things: which when we so admire, we rather praise the Builder, the Workman, the Painter, the Laceman, the Taylor, and the rest, by whose Ingenuity they are produced, than the Person who by his Money makes them his own.”
― Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews / Shamela

“Whoever infringes upon individual 'charity,'" I began, "infringes upon man's nature and scorns his personal dignity. But the organizing of 'social charity' and the question of personal freedom are two different questions and are not mutually exclusive. Individual goodness will always abide, because it is a personal need, a living need for the direct influence of one person on another.
...
In sowing your seed, in sowing your 'charity,' your good deed in whatever form it takes, you give away part of your person and receive into yourself part of another's; you mutually commune in each other; a little more attention, and you will be rewarded with knowledge, with the most unexpected discoveries. You will be bound, finally, to look at your work as a science; it will take in the whole of your life and maybe fill the whole of it. On the other hand, all your thoughts, all the seeds you have sown, which you may already have forgotten, will take on flesh and grow; what was received from you will be passed on to someone else. And how do you know what share you will have in the future outcome of human destiny? And if the knowledge and the whole life of this work finally raises you so high that you are able to plant a tremendous seed, to bequeath a tremendous thought to mankind, then...”
― Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Idiot

“There is another human defect which the Law of Natural Selection has yet to remedy: When people of today have full bellies, they are exactly like their ancestors of a million years ago: very slow to acknowledge any awful troubles they may be in. [...]

This was a particularly tragic flaw a million years ago, since the people who were best informed about the state of the planet [...] and rich and powerful enough to slow down all the waste and destruction going on, were by definition well fed.

So everything was always just fine as far as they were concerned.

For all the computers and measuring instruments and news gatherers and evaluators and memory banks and libraries and experts on this and that at their disposal, their deaf and blind bellies remained the final judges of how urgent this or that problem, such as the destruction of North America’s and Europe’s forests by acid rain, say, might really be.

And here was the sort of advice a full belly gave and still gives [...]: “Be patient. Smile. Be confident. Everything will turn out for the best somehow.”
― Kurt Vonnegut, Galápagos

“Our concern for victims is the secular mask of Christian love.”
― René Girard, I See Satan Fall Like Lightning

“The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)”
― Wendell Berry, The Art of the Commonplace: The Agrarian Essays

“I left the bank
because they wouldn’t deposit
my cheque of poems.
So I went to the store,
but they didn’t accept
my currency of words.
So I boxed all my stories
and took them to charity.
But they refused my donation
and asked me to give blood instead.
I opened the notebooks
and made them look, 'What do you think
I wrote these in?”
― Kamand Kojouri

“Agape love is strengthened by the person who expresses it - not by the person who receives it. In fact, the person who receives agape love does not have to show any appreciation at all.”
― Brian Apollo, How to Value Your Daughters

“The merit of persons is to be no rule of our charity, but we are to do acts of kindness to those that least deserve it.”
― William Law

“Lets toil under the sun to build poles of love. And let our roots be planted like strong trees that strong winds can't move.”
― Oscar Auliq-Ice

“Never exact of a friend in adversity what you would require in prosperity.”
― Joseph Smith Jr.

“We must always remember that it is the things of the spirit that in the end prevail. That caring counts. That where there is no vision, people perish. That hope and faith count, and that without charity there can be nothing good. That by daring to live dangerously, we are learning to live generously. And that by believing in the inherent goodness of man, we may ... 'stride forward into the unknown with growing confidence.”
― John Gilbert Winant