Quotes About Generosity

Generosity is not limited to the giving of material things. We can be generous with our kindness and receptivity. Generosity can mean the simple giving of a smile or extending ourselves to really listen to a friend. Paradoxically, even being willing to receive the generosity of others can be a form of generosity.

She had never realized any love save love as passion. Such love, though it expends itself in generosity and thoughtfulness, though it give birth to visions and to great poetry, remains among the sharpest expressions of self-interest. Not until it has passed though a long servitude, though its own self-hatred, though mockery, though great doubts, can it take its place among the loyalties. Many who have spent a lifetime in it can tell us less of love than the child that lost a dog yesterday.

These self-appointed deacons in the Church of Latter-Day American Literature seem to regard generosity (of words) with suspicion, texture with dislike, and any broad literary stroke with outright hate. The result is a strange and arid literary climate where a meaningless little fingernail paring like Nicholson Baker's Vox becomes an object of fascinated debate and dissection, and a truly ambitious American novel like Matthew's Heart of the Country is all but ignored.

Tyranny brings ignorance and brutality with it. It degrades men from their just rank into the class of brutes; it damps their spirits; it suppresses art; it extinguishes every spark of noble ardor and generosity in the breasts of those who are enslaved by it; it makes naturally strong and great minds feeble and little, and triumphs over the ruins of virtue and humanity.

My personal prayer is simply my joy to be alive, and to live in gratitude and generosity.

The key word of the dedicated Christian should be 'give.' Charitable contributions speak eloquently of your unselfish Christian generosity.

Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts.

Every great leader has a generosity gene.

We all have to lead our own life, and we only have the one life, and the only people who can live life not according to their own desires are those who have no desires--which is the majority, actually. People can say what they like, they can speak of abnegation, sacrifice, generosity, acceptance, and resignation, but it's all false. The norm is for people to think that they desire whatever comes to them, whatever they achieve along the way or whatever is given to them--they have no preconceived desires.

Love and nonattachment are the basis of true generosity.

Anything you do from the soulful self will help lighten the burdens of the world. Anything. You have no idea what the smallest word, the tiniest generosity, can cause to be set in motion...Mend the part of the world that is within your reach.

What is so interesting about giving is not only that it pays, but that it pays in such unexpected ways. When you live with generosity, blessings come to you from corners and avenues you never would have expected.

I have been, am, in his service; I have seen his generosity and goodness; and I will never betray him-not for all the gold in the world. I have come from a village where they don't eat that kind of bread.

Generosity knows how to count, but refrains.

In judging our progress as individuals we tend to concentrate on external factors such as one's social position, influence and popularity, wealth and standard of education... But internal factors may be even more crucial in assessing one's development as a human being. Honesty, sincerity, simplicity, humility, pure generosity, absence of vanity, readiness to serve others - qualities which are within easy reach of every soul - are the foundation of one's spiritual life.

In doing one's work primarily for God, the fear of undue restriction is put, sooner or later, out of the question. He pays me and He pays me well. He pays me and He will not fail to pay me. He pays me not merely for the rule of thumb task, which is all that men recognize, but to everything else I bring to my job in the way of industry, good intentions and cheerfulness. If the Lord loveth a cheerful giver, as St. Paul says, we may depend upon it that He loveth a cheerful worker; and where we can cleave the way to His love there we find His endless generosity.

At best the family teaches the finest things human beings can learn from one another generosity and love. But it is also, all too often, where we learn nasty things like hate, rage and shame.

I have not met [Donald] Trump and discussed any issues with him. There have been Republican administrations like the [George] Bush administration who initiated this AIDS generosity. So it's not purely a right-left thing.

True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself--if I may be allowed the expression--than to itself.

I love heavily tattooed women. I imagine their lives are filled with sensuality and excess, madness and generosity, impulsive natures and fights. They look like they have endured much pain and sadness, yet have the ability to transcend all of it by documenting it on the body

Every trait of beauty may be traced to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, and heroism.

Generosity is often the stalking horse of control.

Maybe that's the way to tell the dangerous men from the good ones. A dreamer of the day is dangerous when he believes that others are less: less than their own best selves and certainly less than he is. They exist to follow and flatter him, and to serve his purposes. A true prophet, I suppose, is like a good parent. A true prophet sees others, not himself. He helps them define their own half-formed dreams, and puts himself at their service. He is not diminished as they become more. He offers courage in one hand and generosity in the other.

Occasionally problems will occur. When it happens to your customers, fix the problem fast. Make it your speed and generosity that gets remembered, not the problem.

Take the long way. Do the hard work, consistently and with generosity and transparency. And then you won't waste time doing it over.

How much that the world calls selfishness is only generosity with narrow walls,--a too exclusive solicitude to maintain a wife in luxury, or make one's children rich.

The act of love . . . is a confession. Selfishness screams aloud, vanity shows off, or else true generosity reveals itself.

I discovered that the horse is life itself, a metaphor but also an example of life's mystery and unpredictability, of life's generosity and beauty, a worthy object of repeated and ever changing contemplation.

Real and lasting generosity requires that a person do more than make up his mind to give. He must also make up his heart.

Generosity is a lovely attribute, and we only practice it when relationships are more important to us than our possessions.

If you are not generous when it's difficult, you will not be generous when it's easy. Generosity is a function of the heart, not the wallet.

The hallmark of an artist is generosity.

Go into the streets, into the slums, into the fashionable quarters. Go into the day courts and the night courts. Become acquainted with sorrow, with many kinds of sorrow. Learn of the wonderful heroism of the poor, of the incredible generosity of the very poor

Generosity is the flower of justice.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more. If you can't feed a hundred people, then just feed one.

We men should be ashamed of ourselves. I think 85 percent of men are dangerous to women. We need to change to a values system nested in compassion and generosity, and women have carried that torch throughout history.

When the preponderance of human beings choose to act with justice and generosity and kindness, then learning and love and decency prevail. When the preponderance of human beings choose power, greed, and indifference to suffering, the world is filled with war, poverty, and cruelty.

Lehman uses many conveyances—including the prose poem, the sestina, and curt rhymes—to travel across the writing life of a poet whose instinctive romanticism is always bracing and tough-minded, brimming with a rare generosity.

...there is no resistance to the idea that what is foreign can be known. Can be understood. Can be held in the embrace of love that holds the Universe. Given this Earth on which we live and grow, given its beauty and generosity, its majesty and comfort, how can one doubt that one is loved? That in fact there is an abundance, not a scarcity of love? It is all anyone ever wants, really, I believe, and it is all around us as we starve.

It has often been said that power corrupts. But it is perhaps equally important to realize that weakness, too, corrupts. Power corrupts the few, while weakness corrupts the many. Hatred, malice, rudeness, intolerance, and suspicion are the faults of weakness. The resentment of the weak does not spring from any injustice done to them but from their sense of inadequacy and impotence. We cannot win the weak by sharing our wealth with them. They feel our generosity as oppression.

The more we stretch the muscle called compassion and generosity, the stronger we get, the better we feel about ourselves, the more loving we become to the world around us.

We must train ourselves in courage and generosity.

Out of the Indian approach to life there came a great freedom, an intense and absorbing respect for life, enriching faith in a Supreme Power, and principles of truth, honesty, generosity, equity, and brotherhood as a guide to mundane relations.

I'm not making excuses for the missed opportunities of the Israelis, or the lack of generosity, the lack of empathy that I think goes hand-in-hand with the suspicion. So, yes, there is more that the Israelis need to do to really demonstrate that they do understand the pain of an oppressed people in their minds, and they want to figure out, within the bounds of security and a Jewish democratic state, what can be accomplished.

Scientists are entitled to be proud of their accomplishments, and what accomplishments can they call 'theirs' except the things they have done or thought of first? People who criticize scientists for wanting to enjoy the satisfaction of intellectual ownership are confusing possessiveness with pride of possession. Meanness, secretiveness and, sharp practice are as much despised by scientists as by other decent people in the world of ordinary everyday affairs; nor, in my experience, is generosity less common among them, or less highly esteemed.

The key to success is radical generosity.

Teach love, generosity, good manners and some of that will drift from the classroom to the home and who knows, the children will be educating the parents.

I think my government are fascists. I feel that if we don't change from a society that worships money and power over to one that worships compassion and generosity, there is no hope for human survival this century.