Quotes About Merit

You will always find that those are most apt to boast of national merit, who have little or not merit of their own to depend on . . .

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.

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!

No one should judge that he has greater perfection because he performs great penances and gives himself in excess to the staying of the body than he who does less, inasmuch as neither virtue nor merit consists therein; for otherwise he would be an evil case, who for some legitimate reason was unable to do actual penance. Merit consists in the virtue of love alone, flavored with the light of true discretion without which the soul is worth nothing.

Stop wishing to merit anyone's gratitude or thinking that anyone can become grateful.

When enlightened people are so poor that they cannot help others, if they speak a word to awaken the confused or to resolve a problem, there is also boundless merit in that.

We certainly do not forget you, so soon as you forget us. It is, perhaps, our fate rather than our merit. We cannot help ourselves.

You really have to wonder why we even bother to get up in the morning. I mean, really: Why work? Simply to buy more stuff? That's just not enough. Look at us all. What's the common assumption that got us all from there to here? What makes us deserve the ice cream and running shoes and wool Italian suits we have? I mean, I see all of us trying so hard to acquire so much stuff, but I can't help but feeling that we didn't merit it.

True merit does not depend on the times or on fashion. Those who have no other advantage than courtly manners lose it when they are away from court. But good sense, knowledge, and wisdom make their possessors knowledgeable and beloved in all ages and in all times.

When a man venerates those worthy of veneration, be they Buddhas or their disciples, who have transcended all obstacles and passed beyond sorrow and tears - venerating such as these, whose passions are extinguished and for whom there is no further source for fear, no one can calculate how great his merit is.

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.

The man who is praised by others is regarded as worthy though he may be really void of all merit. But the man who sings his own praises becomes disgraced though he should be Indra, the possessor of all excellencies.

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

Australia as a nation, as a set of cities and some regional centres, that project died a death and we didn't get it up, but I still think there's merit in that.

So this estate is given each of us to determine whether or not we will merit glory and honor "for ever and ever," or whether we will rebel and refuse or be indifferent and not comply with the conditions and the laws and the ordinances provided by a merciful Father for our guidance through life and our protection and our salvation and thereby, by so doing, deny ourselves the fabulous gift and blessing of eternal life. This life, then, is a time of "sifting," a time when the "wheat" is separated from the "chaff," a time of deciding who is who and where we will live after we die.

Those who mistake their good luck for their merit are inevitably bound for disaster.

To awaken a man who is deceived as to his own merit is to do him as bad a turn as that done to the Athenian madman who was happy in believing that all the ships touching at the port belonged to him.

There are few things more difficult than to appraise the work of a man suddenly dead in his youth; to disentangle promise from achievement; to save him from that sentimentalizing which confuses the tragedy of the interruption with the merit of the work actually performed.

The grand solid merit of jury trial is that the jurors ... are selected at the last moment from the multitude of citizens. They cannot be known beforehand, and they melt back into the multitiude after each trial.

Nearly all the things I do that are of any merit at all start off just being good fun.

To those critics who see capitalism as a system of inegalitarian, oppressive structures, its defenders have vaunted its ability to recognize and encourage what they call individual merit and asserted not only the desirability but also the inevitability of differential reward, of earned privilege, so to speak.

When the philosophers despised riches, it was because they had a mind to vindicate their own merit, and take revenge upon the injustice of fortune by vilifying those enjoyments which she had not given them.

FREEBOOTER, n. A conqueror in a small way of business, whose annexations lack of the sanctifying merit of magnitude.

Stress says that the things we are involved in are important enough to merit our impatience, our lack of grace toward others, or our tight grip of control.

The world is not a meritocracy, as much as we may like to pretend that it is. And we have a long way to go before we really reward people based on their own merit.

Great merit or great failings will make you respected or despised; but trifles, little attentions, mere nothings, either done or neglected, will make you either liked or disliked, in the general run of the world. Examine yourself, why you like such and such people and dislike such and such others; and you will find that those different sentiments proceed from very slight causes.

We can speculate on what's likely, but what's needed is an investigation. And speculation is no substitute for facts. As a former prosecutor, I prosecuted antitrust cases civilly. And I can say that antitrust investigations merit searching, penetrating scrutiny and investigation. That's what we need here.

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.

If a soul is not clothed with the teachings of the Church he cannot merit to have Jesus seated in him.

Beauties in vain their pretty eyes may roll; charms strike the sight, but merit wins the soul.

The more merit, the less affection.

Honourable mention encourages science, and merit is fostered by praise.

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

Our moral efforts are too feeble and falsely motivated to ever merit salvation.

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.

I have sometimes thought that people are, in a sort, happy, that nothing can put out of countenance with themselves, though they neither have nor merit other people's.

It is convention and arbitrary rewards which make all the merit and demerit of what we call vice and virtue.

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.

The earmark favor factory needs to be boarded up and demolished, not turned over to new management that may or may not have a better eye for earmarks with 'merit.'

I find the Doomsday picture Al Gore is painting - a six-meter sea level rise, fifteen times the IPCC number - entirely without merit...I protest vigorously the idea that the climate reacts like a home heating system to a changed setting of the thermostat: just turn the dial, and the desired temperature will soon be reached.

Fear not the anger of the wise to raise; Those best can bear reproof who merit praise.

...the great merit of the place is that one can arrange one's life here exactly as one pleases...there are facilities for every kind of habit and taste, and everything is accepted and understood.

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.

Morality is a burglar's tool whose merit lies in never being left behind at the scene of the crime.

Be patient, because the weaknesses of the body are given to us in this world by God for the salvation of the soul. So they are of great merit when they are borne patiently.

We are saved by grace, through faith in Christ alone! And since there is no room for human merit there can be no grounds for human boasting!