Generous Quotes - Page 4

• If throughout your life you abstain from murder, theft, fornication, perjury, blasphemy, and disrespect toward your parents, church, and your king, you are conventionally held to deserve moral admiration even if you have never done a single kind, generous or useful action. This very inadequate notion of virtue is an outcome of taboo morality, and has done untold harm.

  Bertrand Russell

  Kings, Parent, Disrespect

  Bertrand Russell (2009). “Human Society in Ethics and Politics”, p.27, Routledge

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• This is what rituals are for. We do spiritual ceremonies as human beings in order to create a safe resting place for our most complicated feelings of joy or trauma, so that we don't have to haul those feelings around with us forever, weighing us down. We all need such places of ritual safekeeping. And I do believe that if your culture or tradition doesn't have the specific ritual you are craving, then you are absolutely permitted to make up a ceremony of your own devising, fixing your own broken-down emotional systems with all the do-it-yourself resourcefulness of a generous plumber/poet.

  Elizabeth Gilbert

  Spiritual, Believe, Emotional

  Elizabeth Gilbert (2010). “The Complete Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat, Pray, Love; Committed; The Last American Man; Stern Men & Pilgrims”, p.178, A&C Black

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• Of the seven days God gave to us in a week, He said to take six, and use them for our business. Yet we think that we must have the seventh as well. It is like someone who, while traveling, comes upon a poor man in distress. Having but seven shillings, the generous person gives the poor man six, but when the wretch scrambles to his feet, he follows his benefactor to knock him down and steal the seventh shilling from him.

  Charles Spurgeon

  Thinking, Men, Feet

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• when fate is very generous with us, there is always a well into which all our dreams can tumble.

  Paulo Coelho

  Dream, Fate, Wells

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• You must therefore zealously guard in his mind the curious assumption 'My time is my own'. Let him have the feeling that he starts each day as the lawful possessor of twenty-four hours. Let him feel as a grievous tax that portion of this property which he has to make over to him employers, and as a generous donation that further portion which h allows to religious duties. But what he must never be permitted to doubt is that the total from which these deductions have been made was, in some mysterious sense, his own personal birthright.

  C. S. Lewis

  Religious, Feelings, Doubt

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• No human being, when you understand his desires, is worthless. No one's life is nothing. Even the most evil of men and women, if you understand their hearts, had some generous act that redeems them, at least a little, from their sins.

  Orson Scott Card

  Life Lesson, Heart, Men

  Orson Scott Card (2009). “Speaker for the Dead”, p.97, Macmillan

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• Be generous in prosperity and thankful in adversity, Be fair in thy judgment, and guarded in thy speech. Be a lamp unto those who walk in darkness, and a home to the stranger. Be eyes to the blind, and a guiding light unto the feet of the erring. Be a breath of life to the body of humankind, a dew to the soil of the human heart, and a fruit upon the tree of humility.

  Bahá'u'lláh

  Home, Heart, Adversity

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• It is difficult to be generous-minded to those we have greatly harmed.

  P. D. James

  Difficult

  P. D. James (2010). “The Children of Men”, p.166, Vintage

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• 3:12 pm Secretly, I admit, I find many of my classmates annoying. I've often thought to myself, 'Good grief, these people are five-year-olds. Why must I spend my days among them?' But have I ever said such things aloud? No. I have been nothing but generous to them, and kept these thoughts to myself. And how have they repaid me? Have they been grateful or kind? Ho NO!

  Jaclyn Moriarty

  Grief, Grateful, Years

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• You are too generous to trifle with me. If your feelings are still what they were last April, tell me so at once. My affections and wishes are unchanged; but one word from you will silence me on this subject for ever.

  Jane Austen

  Pride, Silence, Feelings

  Jane Austen (2007). “The Complete Novels of Jane Austen”, p.458, Wordsworth Editions

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• All of us--all who knew her--felt so wholesome after we cleaned ourselves on her. We were so beautiful when we stood astride her ugliness. Her simplicity decorated us, her guilt sanctified us, her pain made us glow with health, her awkwardness made us think we had a sense of humor. Her inarticulateness made us believe we were eloquent. Her poverty kept us generous. Even her waking dreams we used--to silence our own nightmares.

  Toni Morrison

  Beautiful, Dream, Pain

  Toni Morrison (2014). “The Bluest Eye”, p.161, Random House

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• I can see that I imagine all kinds of rejection that never happens. I can see that I beg and plead for love that is freely offered because I somehow believe that if I don't ask for it, everyone will forget about me: I will be a little kid sent off to sleep-away camp whose parents forget to meet her at the bus when she comes back in August. Or else I think people are nice to me only to be nice to me, that they feel sorry for me because I am such a loser- as if anyone could possibly be that generous.

  Elizabeth Wurtzel

  Sorry, Nice, Believe

  Elizabeth Wurtzel (2007). “More, Now, Again: A Memoir of Addiction”, p.30, Simon and Schuster

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• But the poor person does not exist as an inescapable fact of destiny. His or her existence is not politically neutral, and it is not ethically innocent. The poor are a by-product of the system in which we live and for which we are responsible. They are marginalized by our social and cultural world. They are the oppressed, exploited proletariat, robbed of the fruit of their labor and despoiled of their humanity. Hence the poverty of the poor is not a call to generous relief action, but a demand that we go and build a different social order.

  Gustavo Gutiérrez

  Responsibility, Destiny, Order

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• How can both Nics, the loving and considerate and generous one, and the self-obsessed and self-destructive one, be the same person?

  David Sheff

  Self, Obsessed, Considerate

  David Sheff (2009). “Beautiful Boy: A Father's Journey Through His Son's Addiction”, p.96, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt

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• Immigration policy should be generous; it should be fair; it should be flexible. With such a policy we can turn to the world, and to our own past, with clean hands and a clear conscience.

  John F. Kennedy

  Past, Hands, Immigration

  President John F. Kennedy (2016). “A Nation Of Immigrants”, p.104, Pickle Partners Publishing

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• As my mother once said to me, ‘They’re quite crazy, dear – men are. What you look for is one of them whose insanity is large enough, and calm and generous enough, to include you.

  Charles Baxter

  Mother, Crazy, Men

  Charles Baxter (2009). “The Feast of Love”, p.138, Vintage

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• Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery

  Morning, Memories, Together

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• There is indeed a certain sense of gratification when we do a good deed that gives us inward satisfaction, and a generous pride that accompanies a good conscience…These testimonies of a good conscience are pleasant; and such a natural pleasure is very beneficial to us; it is the only payment that can never fail. “On Repentance

  Michel de Montaigne

  Pride, Giving, Inward

  Michel de Montaigne, John Michael Cohen (1959). “Essays”, Penguin Classics

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• There is scarce any one invention, which this nation has produced in our age, but it has some way or other been set forward by his assistance. ... He is indeed a man born for the good of mankind, and for the honour of his country. ... So I may thank God, that Dr. Wilkins was an Englishman, for wherever he had lived, there had been the chief seat of generous knowledge and true philosophy.

  Robert Hooke

  God, Country, Philosophy

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• You have to be generous if you want to spend your time making someone else dinner. Even if you're charging, you're still giving.

  Mario Batali

  Giving, Want, Dinner

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• We're all generous, but with different things, like time, money, talent - criticism.

  Frank A. Clark

  Criticism, Different, Talent

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• It needs as much generosity to take as to give.

  Ivan Panin

  Generosity, Giving, Needs

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• It may be very generous in one person to offer what it would be ungenerous in another to accept.

  Samuel Richardson

  Would Be, May, Accepting

  Samuel Richardson (1755). “A collection of the moral and instructive sentiments, maxims, cautions, and reflexions, contained in the histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison: Digested under proper heads, with references to the volume, ...”, p.130

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• It is always so pleasant to be generous, though very vexatious to pay debts.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson

  Generosity, Debt, Pay

  Ralph Waldo Emerson (2013). “Delphi Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (Illustrated)”, p.1481, Delphi Classics

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• Generosity wins favour for everyone, especially when it is accompanied by modesty.

  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

  Winning, Generosity, Favour

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