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Benevolence Quotes

Benevolence Quotes by Moses Mendelssohn, Ellen G. White, William Penn, Sun Tzu, William Blake, Jimmy Sangster and many others.

The state dictates and coerces; religion teaches and persuades. The state enacts laws; religion gives commandments. The state is armed with physical force and makes use of it if need be; the force of religion is love and benevolence.
Moses Mendelssohn
Every act, every deed of justice and mercy and benevolence, makes heavenly music in Heaven.
Ellen G. White
Were the superfluities of a nation valued, and made a perpetual tax or benevolence, there would be more alms-houses than poor, schools than scholars, and enough to spare for government besides.
William Penn
When one treats people with benevolence, justice and righteousness, and reposes confidence in them, the army will be united in mind and all will be happy to serve their leaders.
Sun Tzu
You smile with pomp and rigor, you talk of benevolence and virtue; I act with benevolence and virtue and get murdered time after time.
William Blake
A benevolent mind, and the face assumes the patterns of benevolence. An evil mind, then an evil face.
Jimmy Sangster
What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. … All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone! … Your interference is doing him positive injury.
Frederick Douglass
To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence.
Ann Plato
Kindness is the language which the deaf can hear and the blind can see.
Mark Twain
The entire world shall be populous with that action which saves one soul from despair.
Omar Khayyam
I remember my father, who was ‘somebody’ in the synagogue, bringing home with him one of the poor men who waited outside to be chosen to share the Passover meal. These patriarchal manners I remember well, although there was about them an air of bourgeois benevolence which was somewhat comic.
Jacob Epstein
Generosity is only benevolence in practice.
Thomas Ken
Humanity, perhaps, that quality of benevolence that humans have, without irony, named after themselves.
Laini Taylor
How quickly a truly benevolent act is repaid by the consciousness of having done it!
Hosea Ballou
When the great Tao is abandoned, benevolence and righteousness arise.
Laozi
Politeness is fictitious benevolence.
Samuel Johnson
Pastries . . . can only be appreciated to the full extent of their subtlety when they are not eaten to assuage our hunger, when the orgy of their sugary sweetness is not destined to full some primary need but to coat our palate with all the benevolence of the world.
Muriel Barbery
Benevolence, like religion, awes even those it cannot win.
Sophia Lee
A gentleman makes friends by learning together with others, and he looks to friends to help him cultivate benevolence.
Zengzi
Asana is perfect firmness of body, steadiness of intelligence, and benevolence of spirit.
B.K.S. Iyengar
They who say that we should love our fellow-citizens but not foreigners, destroy the universal brotherhood of mankind, with which benevolence and justice would perish forever.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception.
Joanna Trollope
When virtue is lost, benevolence appears, when benevolence is lost right conduct appears, when right conduct is lost, expedience appears. Expediency is the mere shadow of right and truth; it is the beginning of disorder.
Lao Tzu
It is a curious paradox of human history that a doctrine that tells human beings to regard themselves as sacrificial animals has been accepted as a doctrine representing benevolence and love for mankind.
Nathaniel Branden
There is in Aristotle an almost complete absence of what may be called benevolence or philanthropy. The sufferings of mankind . . . there is no evidence that they cause him unhappiness except when the sufferers happen to be his friends.
Bertrand Russell
Now we shall possess a right definition of faith if we call it a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence toward us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit.
John Calvin
That which is really beautiful has no need of anything; not more than law, not more than truth, not more than benevolence or modesty.
Marcus Aurelius
In the West, people pride themselves on being the defenders of democratic rights and the champions of freedom. But if the Western world really cares for the benevolence of the whole world, it will have to turn to introspection.
Nirmala Srivastava
The unaffected language of real feeling and benevolence is easily understood, and is never ridiculous.
Maria Edgeworth
I call that person the most intelligent who sees the benevolence, the ascent and the ultimate goal.
Nirmala Srivastava
Our hands we open of our own free will, and the good flies, which we can never recall.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Nobody but a beggar chooses to depend chiefly upon the benevolence of his fellow-citizens.
Adam Smith
No sincere desire of doing good need make an enemy of a single human being; that philanthropy has surely a flaw in it which cannot sympathize with the oppressor equally as with the oppressed.
James Russell Lowell
Dying legacies are a miserable substitute for living benevolence.
Ellen G. White
To be fond of learning is near to wisdom; to practice with vigor is near to benevolence; and to be conscious of shame is near to fortitude.
Confucius
Benevolence today has become altogether too huge an undertaking to be conducted otherwise than on business lines.
Julius Rosenwald
Animated by Christian motives and directed to Christian ends, it shall in no wise go unrewarded: here, by the testimony of an approving conscience; hereafter, by the benediction of our blessed Redeemer, and a brighter inheritance his Father’s house.
Richard Mant
Half the misery of human life might be extinguished if men would alleviate the general curse they lie under by mutual offices of compassion, benevolence, and humanity.
Joseph Addison
Nothing teaches character better than generosity.
Jim Rohn
In regard to the colored people, there is always more that is benevolent, I perceive, than just, manifested towards us. What I ask for the negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy,
but simply justice.
Frederick Douglass
The mission of the United States is one of benevolent assimilation.
William McKinley
There’s so much benevolence on helping your fellow person. And the morality that helped build our country is based on the values that are found in the Bible. And as we look at problems, maybe we’re getting away from those values. And in my little small way, I want to encourage people to get back into those values.
Tom Hayden
Exemplary people concern themselves with virtue,
small people concern themselves with territory. The ruling class
thinks of punishment, the lower classes hope for benevolence.
Confucius
Mankind was my business… charity, mercy, forbearance, benevolence, were all my business.
Charles Dickens
The benevolence of wrapping the partridge in a vine leaf brings out its quality, just as the barrel of Diogenes brought forth the qualities of the great thinker.
Emmanuel des Essarts
We want, in fact, not so much a father in heaven as a grandfather in heaven: a senile benevolence who, as they say, “liked to see young people enjoying themselves” and whose plan for the universe was simply that it might be truly said at the end of each day, “a good time was had by all.”
C. S. Lewis
The little mind who loves itself, will wr’te and think with the vulgar; but the great mind will be bravely eccentric, and scorn the beaten road, from universal benevolence.
Oliver Goldsmith
My description of wisdom has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is to do with being wise in one’s own virtue, nothing more. My description of being has nothing to do with benevolence and righteousness, it is that one should be led by one’s innate nature, nothing more.
Zhuangzi
The Master said, I set my heart on the Way, base myself on virtue, lean upon benevolence for support and take my recreation in the arts.
Confucius
When thou seest thine enemy in trouble, curl not thy whiskers in contempt; for in every bone there is marrow, and within every jacket there is a man.
Saadi
[T]he blossom of benevolence, of charity, is the fairest flower, no matter whether it blooms by the side of a hovel, or bursts from a vine climbing the marble pillar of a palace. I respect no man because he is rich; I hold in contempt no man because he is poor.
Robert Green Ingersoll
It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, by leaving much to free will, even with some loss of the object , than to attempt to make men mere machines and instruments of political benevolence. The world on the whole will gain by a liberty, without which virtue cannot exist.
Edmund Burke
All things share the same breath – the beast, the tree, the man… the air shares its spirit with all the life it supports.
Chief Seattle
It is clearly better that property should be private, but the use of it common; and the special business of the legislator is to create in men this benevolent disposition.
Aristotle
There cannot be a move glorious object in creation than a human being replete with benevolence, meditating in what manner he might render himself most acceptable to his Creator by doing most good to His creatures.
Henry Fielding
It’s the Muslims who are dragging the rest of the world with them, in their genocidal dreams of annihilating goodness, creativity, production, inventiveness, benevolence, charity, medicine, technology, and all of the gifts of the Jews. Our goodness makes them ill.
Pamela Geller
Good manners are the expressions of benevolence in personal intercourse, by which we endeavor to promote the comfort and enjoyment of others, and to avoid all that gives needless uneasiness.
Catharine Beecher
We should do good whenever we can and do kindness at all times, for at all times we can.
Joseph Joubert
The symptoms of compassion and benevolence, in some people, are like those minute guns which warn you that you are in deadly peril.
Sophie Swetchine
Self-love, in a well-regulated breast, is as the steward of the household, superintending the expenditure, and seeing that benevolence herself should be prudential, in order to be permanent, by providing that the reservoir which feeds should also be fed.
Charles Caleb Colton
Mr. Marx does not believe in God, but he believes deeply in himself. His heart is filled not with love but with rancor. He has very little benevolence toward men and becomes… furious and… spiteful… when anyone dares question the omniscience of the divinity whom he adores, that is to say, Mr. Marx himself.
Mikhail Bakunin
We like where we live and we wanna participate in our neighbourhoods and communities and stuff and try to- we’re not like benevolent- it’s pretty basic.
Jon Fishman
I love to observe Christmas in quietude, humility, benevolence, charity, letting good will towards man, eloquent silence, prayer, and praise express my conception of Truth’s appearing.
Mary Baker Eddy
Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice.
Baruch Spinoza
The office of liberality consisteth in giving with judgment.
Marcus Tullius Cicero
Though, in debating with regard to theories, it be lawful to say whether this or that is consistent with the Divine attributes, yet, when we find that God has actually done any thing, all question about its justice, wisdom, and benevolence, is forever out of place.
Nehemiah Adams
The administration of government lies in getting proper men. Such men are to be got by means of the ruler’s own character. That character is to be cultivated by his treading in the ways of duty. And the treading those ways of duty is to be cultivated by the cherishing of benevolence.
Confucius
When people ask me about what I learned from martial arts, I don’t talk about favorite punches or kicks, or about fights won or lost. I talk about learning self-discipline, about ethics and manners and benevolence and fairness.
Jonathan Maberry
In a way, every parent is sort of dependent on the benevolence of the society around them to take care of their children.
Mohsin Hamid
cruelty and benevolence are but shades of the same colour.
Khaled Hosseini
The highest benevolence acts without purpose.
Laozi
Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man.
Karl Pearson
Religion, charity, pure benevolence, and morals, mingled up with superstitious rites and ferocious cruelty, form in their combination institutions the most powerful and the most pernicious that have ever afflicted mankind.
John Quincy Adams
Kind words are benedictions. The are not only instruments of power, but of benevolence and courtesy; blessings both to the speaker and hearer of them.
Arthur Frederick Saunders
That is fine benevolence, finely executed, which, like the Nile, comes from hidden sources.
Charles Caleb Colton
The man of wisdom is never of two minds; the man of benevolence never worries; the man of courage is never afraid.
Confucius
It goes without saying that there’s a great deal of evil in the world, and there’s a great deal of benevolence or good in the world. I think the choices that people make and the paths that people take in terms of how they explore their lives ultimately is what dictates which side of the coin you fall on.
Rupert Wyatt
Be generous, and pleasant-tempered, and forgiving; even as God scatter favors over thee, do thou scatter over the people.
Saadi
It is, indeed, at home that every man must be known by those who would make a just estimate either of his virtue or felicity; for smiles and embroidery are alike occasional, and the mind is often dressed for show in painted honor, and fictitious benevolence.
Samuel Johnson
Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Surely happiness is reflective, like the light of heaven; and every countenance, bright with smiles, and glowing with innocent enjoyment, is a mirror transmitting to others the rays of a supreme and ever-shining benevolence.
Washington Irving
A heavy guilt rests upon us for what the whites of all nations have done to the colored peoples. When we do good to them, it is not benevolence–it is atonement.
Albert Schweitzer
Mojo grace means the shocking benevolence of a mysterious force beyond our comprehension.
Rob Brezsny
The big belly can accommodate all kinds of things. The benevolence is never let a dust behind.
Gautama Buddha
Mr. President, the dedication of 35 percent of all construction contracts to women is really mind blowing to say the least. President Jonathan’s benevolence to women is unbelievably phenomenal.
Kema Chikwe
A man should fear when he only enjoys what good he does publicly. Is it not the publicity rather than the charity he loves? Is it not vanity, rather than benevolence, that gives such charities?
Henry Ward Beecher
As we learned from the Clinton administration and much of the media, a machine gun in the hands of a federal agent is now a symbol of benevolence and concern for a child’s well-being.
James Bovard
Of all the virtues necessary to the completion of the perfect man, there is none to be more delicately implied and less ostentatiously vaunted than that of exquisite feeling or universal benevolence.
Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1st Baron Lytton
God will excuse our prayers for ourselves whenever we are prevented from them by being occupied in such good works as to entitle us to the prayers of others.
Charles Caleb Colton
He was so benevolent, so merciful a man that, in his mistaken passion, he would have held an umbrella over a duck in a shower of rain.
Douglas William Jerrold
We can no more tolerate neutrality and benevolence toward every conceivable form of discourse, including that of magical thinking, than we can lump together executioner and victim, good and evil.
Michel Onfray
In a conquered country benevolence is not humanitarianism. It is a general political axiom that a conqueror must not inspire a good opinion of his benevolence until he has demonstrated that he can be severe with malefactors.
Napoleon Bonaparte
Without love, benevolence becomes egotism.
Martin Luther King, Jr.
Every man has frequent grievances which only the solicitude of friendship will discover and remedy, and which would remain for ever unheeded in the mighty heap of human calamity, were it only surveyed by the eye of general benevolence equally attentive to every misery.
Samuel Johnson
A sincere acquaintance with ourselves teaches us humility; and from humility springs that benevolence which compassionates the transgressors we condemn, and prevents the punishments we inflict from themselves partaking of crime, in being rather the wreakings of revenge than the chastisements of virtue.
Jane Porter
Now this might disturb you, but I find I’m OK by myself; and I don’t need you or your benevolence to make sense.
Steven Morrissey
Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality, and benevolence; the other from pride or fear, or from the fact that you cannot take your money with you to the other world.
Martial
In a perfect world perhaps we would all see more clearly. But this is not a perfect world, and it is enough to hope that each of us will share our talents, and find the balance between greed and benevolence that will allow us to live and thrive and help the world around us grow.
Kent Nerburn
States strong enough to do good are but few.
Their number would seem limited to three.
Robert Frost
‘Tis never for their wisdom that one loves the wisest, or for their wit that one loves the wittiest; ’tis for benevolence, and virtue, and honest fondness, one loves people…
Hester Lynch Piozzi
Profanation and violation are part of the perversity of sex, which never will conform to liberal theories of benevolence. Every model of morally or politically correct sexual behavior will be subverted by nature’s daemonic law.
Camille Paglia
Circumstance does not make the man; it reveals him to himself.
James Allen
There is in St. Paul’s definite, soul-stirring assertion of the wrath of God and the reality of the judgment at hand, a truth more profound than any that underlies our somewhat enfeebled ideas of universal benevolence and the determined progress of the race.
Roland Allen
Benevolence and feeling ennoble the most trifling actions.
William Makepeace Thackeray
Good deeds in this life are coals raked up in embers, to make a fire next day
Thomas Overbury
When we are in competition with ourselves, and match our todays against our yesterdays, we derive encouragement from past misfortunes and blemishes. Moreover, the competition with ourselves leaves unimpaired our benevolence toward our fellow men.
Eric Hoffer
Wealth is a dangerous inheritance, unless the inheritor is trained to active benevolence.
Charles Simmons
Christianity, by introducing into Europe the truest principles of humanity, universal benevolence, and brotherly love, had happily abolished civil slavery. Let us who profess the same religion practice its precepts… by agreeing to this duty.
Richard Henry Lee
The paternal and filial duties discipline the heart, and prepare it for the love of all mankind. The intensity of private attachment encourages, not prevents, universal benevolence.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
So far as I am acquainted with the principles and doctrines of Freemasonry, I conceive it to be founded in benevolence and to be exercised only for the good of mankind.
George Washington
Rectitude carried to excess hardens into stiffness; benevolence indulged beyond measure sinks into weakness.
Date Masamune
To feel much for others and little for ourselves, that to restrain our selfish, and to indulge our benevolent affections, constitutes the perfection of human nature.
Adam Smith
Every soul, the philosopher says, is involuntarily deprived of truth; consequently in the same way it is deprived of justice and temperance and benevolence and everything of the kind. It is most necessary to keep this in mind, for thus thou wilt be more gentle towards all.
Marcus Aurelius
Power rises to the top like cream and dominates the weak with cruelty disguised as — and often even believed to be — benevolence.
Michael J. Sullivan
There is no truer cause of unhappiness amongst men than, where naturally expecting charity and benevolence, they receive harm and vexation.
Francois Rabelais
We both can be the most beautiful and benevolent creatures on the planet, but then there’s another side that can be as harsh and as ugly as the darkest thing you could imagine seeing.
Terrence Howard
Without strong affection, and humanity of heart, and gratitude to that Being whose code is mercy, and whose great attribute is benevolence to all things that breathe, true happiness can never be attained.
Charles Dickens
You have no idea, sir, how difficult it is to be the victim of benevolence.
Zora Neale Hurston
Every account of a higher power that I’ve seen described, of all religions that I’ve seen, include many statements with regard to the benevolence of that power. When I look at the universe and all the ways the universe wants to kill us, I find it hard to reconcile that with statements of beneficence.
Neil deGrasse Tyson
The scheme, my dear Marqs. which you propose as a precedent, to encourage the emancipation of the black people of this Country from that state of Bondage in wch. they are held, is a striking evidence of the benevolence of your Heart. I shall be happy to join you in so laudable a work.
George Washington
Never did any soul do good but it came readier to do the same again, with more enjoyment. Never was love or gratitude or bounty practiced but with increasing joy, which made the practicer still more in love with the fair act.
Anthony Ashley-Cooper, 7th Earl of Shaftesbury
Open your hands, ye whose hands are full! The world is waiting for you! The whole machinery of the Divine beneficence is clogged by your hard hearts and rigid fingers.
Give and spend,
and be sure that God will send;
for only in giving and spending
do you fulfill the object of His sending.
Bill Vaughan
Love should make joy; but our benevolence is unhappy. Our Sunday-schools, and churches, and pauper-societies are yokes to the neck. We pain ourselves to please nobody.
Ralph Waldo Emerson
Starbucks trying to build a different kind of company around the balance of profitably and benevolence. A social conscience. And that isn’t a program it has to be a way of life.
Howard Schultz
If the prince of a State love benevolence, he will have no opponent in all the empire.
Mencius
Politeness has been well defined as benevolence in small things.
Thomas B. Macaulay
Both love of mankind, and respect for their rights are duties; the former however is only a conditional, the latter an unconditional, purely imperative duty, which he must be perfectly certain not to have transgressed who would give himself up to the secret emotions arising from benevolence.
Immanuel Kant
Every fresh act of benevolence is the herald of deeper satisfaction; every charitable act a stepping-stone towards heaven.
Henry Ward Beecher
When a uniform exercise of kindness to prisoners on our part has been returned by as uniform severity on the part of our enemies,you must excuse me for saying it is high time, by other lessons, to teach respect to the dictates of humanity; in such a case, retaliation becomes an act of benevolence.
Thomas Jefferson
But friendship is precious, not only in the shade, but in the sunshine of life, and thanks to a benevolent arrangement the greater part of life is sunshine.
Thomas Jefferson
To damage the sovereignty of the individual is to replace a community inspired by love, benevolence, and beauty by another based solely on power.
Anwar Sadat
It’s more blessed to give than to receive – especially kittens.
Bill Cosby
The disposition to give a cup of cold water to a disciple is a far nobler property than the finest intellect. Satan has a fine intellect, but not the image of God.
William Dean Howells
True benevolence or compassion, extends itself through the whole of existence and sympathizes with the distress of every creature capable of sensation.
Joseph Addison
If you aren’t creeped out by the No Birth Control Left Behind rhetoric of the White House and Planned Parenthood, you aren’t listening closely enough. The anesthetic of progressive benevolence always dulls the senses. Wake up.
Michelle Malkin