Quotes About Merit

Only by spiritual practice can we break through our karma and the effects of the causes we have made. Only then can we escape from them. It matters not whether you have acquired any merit. Merit is merit. Karma is karma. Nonetheless, if one practices the Quan Yin Method, one can be liberated regardless of having any merit or not. It is so logical, so scientific.

When you bring an idea that has no merit to me, and you ask me to comment on it, I'm going to tell you it has no merit.

There is a sort of homely truth and naturalness in some books which is very rare to find, and yet looks cheap enough. There may benothing lofty in the sentiment, or fine in the expression, but it is careless country talk. Homeliness is almost as great a merit in a book as in a house, if the reader would abide there. It is next to beauty, and a very high art. Some have this merit only.

The merit of a democratic regime rests on one's continual willingness to exchange views, and to compete on the basis of individual merit and capacities.

I don't have an extraordinary degree of self-confidence, but I know the gift I have been given from God and I try to share it with as many people as possible. Having a great voice is not a merit. I don't think it is a merit.

You will see in this my notion of good works, that I am far from expecting to merit heaven by them. By heaven we understand a state of happiness, infinite in degree, and eternal in duration. I can do nothing to deserve such rewards... Even the mixed imperfect pleasures we enjoy in this world, are rather from God's goodness than our merit, how much more such happiness of heaven!

By Christ's purchasing redemption, two things are intended: his satisfaction and his merit; the one pays our debt, and so satisfies; the other procures our title, and so merits. The satisfaction of Christ is to free us from misery; the merit of Christ is to purchase happiness for us.

No cause more frequently produces bashfulness than too high an opinion of our own importance. He that imagines an assembly filled with his merit, panting with expectation, and hushed with attention, easily terrifies himself with the dread of disappointing them, and strains his imagination in pursuit of something that may vindicate the veracity of fame, and show that his reputation was not gained by chance.

Commerce is so far from being beneficial to arts, or to empire, that it is destructive of both, as all their history shows, for the above reason of individual merit being its great hatred. Empires flourish till they become commercial, and then they are scattered abroad to the four winds.

Men sometimes feel injured by praise because it assigns a limit to their merit; few people are modest enough not to take offense that one appreciates them.

We certainly do not forget you as soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves. We live at home, quiet, confined, and our feelings prey upon us. You are forced on exertion. You have always a profession, pursuits, business of some sort or other, to take you back into the world immediately, and continual occupation and change soon weaken impressions.

When one, abandoning greed, feels no greed for what would merit greed, greed gets shed from him - like a drop of water from a lotus leaf.

The West has given us the liberal miracle of individual rights, individual responsibility, merit, and human satisfaction.

In the founders of great families, titles or attributes of honor are generally correspondent with the virtues of the person to whom they are applied; but in their descendants they are too often the marks rather of grandeur than of merit. The stamp and denomination still continue, but the intrinsic value is frequently lost.

You can see why there are more people wanting to come from economically-distressed areas, and they can't all come to America. So it gets into the valid, legitimate debate over immigration as to how do we choose. Do we have a diversity lottery and take people from everywhere, do we base it more on merit?

It is the merit of a general to impart good news, and to conceal the truth.

A war, or any wild-goose chase, is, as the vulgar use the phrase, a lucky turn-up of patronage for the minister, whose chief merit is the art of keeping himself in place.

We blame equally him who is too proud to put a proper value on his own merit and him who prizes too highly his spurious worth.

Man's chief merit consists in resisting the impulses of his nature.

When we are dead we are praised by those who survive us, though we frequently have no other merit than that of being no longer alive.

It is far more honest to be undeservedly ignored than to be honoured without merit.

It is no wonder you are tempted; on the contrary, it would be something new if you were not, because man's life is nothing but temptation, and no one is exempt from it, especially those who have given themselves to God; his own Son even passed through this trial. But if it is necessary for everyone, it is also a source of merit for those to whom God grants the grace of turning all things to good, as you do.

Perpetual modernism is the measure of merit in every work of art.

... we must drive them [Jews] out like mad dogs, so that we do not become partakers of their abominable blasphemy and all the their other vices and thus merit God's wrath and be damned with them.

Vanity is a strong temptation to lying; it makes people magnify their merit, over flourish their family, and tell strange stories of their interest and acquaintance.

The story of the Jews in the Bible is replete with incidents of their ingratitude to God for His gifts to them: incidents that just as repeatedly merit and receive punishment.

Human cultures are all experiments in trying to find a form that will fit the matter of our immediacy; but it is absolutely not the case that all such experiments are of equal merit or value. Some cultures - and modernity is patently one - have managed to transmute consciousness into the "disease" that Nietzsche called it, the self-affliction of a self-centeredness that has purged itself of all vestiges of wisdom and value.

Therefore the Sage embraces Unity, and is a model for all under Heaven. He is free from self-display, therefore he shines forth; from self-assertion, therefore he is distinguished; from self-glorification, therefore he has merit; from self-exaltation, therefore he rises superior to all. Inasmuch as he does not strive, there is no one in the world who can strive with him.

The pleasures of this world are rather from God's goodness than our own merit.

Artists have to believe in the merit of their own work and persevere whether they receive public recognition or not, but it's ever so nice when someone says, "Job well done"!

The good must merit God's peculiar care; But who but God can tell us who they are?

God's love is an exercise of his goodness toward sinners who merit only condemnation.

Titles and mottoes to books are like escutcheons and dignities in the hands of a king. The wise sometimes condescend to accept of them; but none but a fool would imagine them of any real importance. We ought to depend upon intrinsic merit, and not the slender helps of the title.

Charm strikes the sight, but merit wins the soul.

The Buddha taught some people the teachings of duality that help them avoid sin and acquire spiritual merit. To others he taught non-duality, that some find profoundly frightening.

The market system requires that people be committed and willing to work hard. Inherent with that is what I call a merit system, which I think gives people the greatest opportunity.

There is small merit in mocking goodness, tweaking charity; it is much more comic to deprive people of their petty little existence for no reason at all, for a lark.

Imposed philosophical morality (laws/rules) will not save the world. Only a calculated tangible plan to alter our circumstances so such actions pose no merit will stop immoral behaviour.

Grace ceases to be grace if God is compelled to bestow it in the presence of human merit.

The mice which helplessly find themselves between the cats teeth acquire no merit from their enforced sacrifice.

There are remuneration packages that will no longer be tolerated because they bear no relation to merit. That those who create jobs and wealth may earn a lot of money is not shocking. But that those who contribute to destroying jobs and wealth also earn a lot of money is morally indefensible.

Learning is a friend on the journey; a wife in the house; medicine in sickness; and religious merit is the only friend after death.

The painter will produce pictures of little merit if he takes the works of others as his standard.

Honesty is the first chapter in the Book of wisdom. Let it be our endeavor to merit the character of a just nation.

Nature makes merit, and fortune puts it to work.

Horsemanship is the one art for which it seems one needs only practice. However, practice without true principles is nothing other than routine, the fruit of which is a strained and unsure execution, a false diamond which dazzles semi-connoisseurs often more impressed by the accomplishments of the horse than the merit of the horseman.

It is India that gave us the ingenious method of expressing all numbers by means of ten symbols, each symbol receiving a value of position as well as an absolute value; a profound and important idea which appears so simple to us now that we ignore its true merit. But its very simplicity and the great ease which it has lent to computations put our arithmetic in the first rank of useful inventions; and we shall appreciate the grandeur of the achievement the more when we remember that it escaped the genius of Archimedes and Apollonius, two of the greatest men produced by antiquity.

Sentimentalists ... adopt whatever merit is in good repute, and almost make it hateful with their praise. The warmer their expressions, the colder we feel.... Cure the drunkard, heal the insane, mollify the homicide, civilize the Pawnee, but what lessons can be devised for the debauchee of sentiment?