Charity Quotes

#1. Spend more time considering evidences of grace in other Christians than you do pondering their sins and weaknesses. You, as a Christian, probably have a much greater ability to see weakness in other believers than to see strength. It is as if you use a magnifying glass when looking for weakness and a telescope when looking for grace. Brooks warns, Sin is darkness, grace is light; sin is hell, grace is heaven; and what madness is it to look more at darkness than at light, more at hell than at heaven. Indeed.

~ Thomas Brooks

The mission sat in a converted store front on the corner of a medium-busy street. There was a small crowd gathered in front - no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, all all you had to do was spend a few moments of your life listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to Hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn't hungry.

~ Jeff Lindsay

It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.

~ Stephen King

Greed is a suit that’s tailor made: it finds a way to fit every lifestyle, no matter how much or how little you earn.

~ Casey N. Cep

Some people want what they are not willing to give.

~ Brenda Johnson Padgitt

A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.

~ Jack London

I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.

~ Abraham Lincoln

It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.

~ Ayn Rand

Really, seeing the amount we give in charity, the wonder is there are any poor left. It is a comfort that there are. What should we do without them? Our fur-clad little girls! our jolly, red-faced squires! we should never know how good they were, but for the poor? Without the poor how could we be virtuous? We should have to go about giving to each other. And friends expect such expensive presents, while a shilling here and there among the poor brings to us all the sensations of a good Samaritan. Providence has been very thoughtful in providing us with poor.

~ Jerome K. Jerome

...a great man who is vicious will only be a great doer of evil, and a rich man who is not liberal will be only a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it - and not by spending as he please but by knowing how to spend it well. To the poor gentleman there is no other way of showing that he is a gentleman than by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered and helpful; not haughty, arrogant or censorious, but above all by being charitable...and no one who sees him adorned with the virtues I have mentioned, will fail to recognize and judge him, though he know him not, to be of good stock.

~ Miguel De Cervantes Saavedra

I am astonished at the pleasure one experiences in doing good, and I should be tempted to believe that what we call virtuous people have not so much merit as they lead us to suppose.

~ Pierre-Ambroise Choderlos De Laclos

The next time you want to withhold your help, or your love, or your support for another for whatever the reason, ask yourself a simple question: do the reasons you want to withhold it reflect more on them or on you? And which reasons do you want defining you forevermore?

~ Dan Pearce

It is the apathetic person that sees the cause while the charitable person sees the need.

~ Shannon L. Alder

Giving is the only gift we should all endeavour to give the world each day.

~ Auliq Ice

You often say, “I would give, but only to the deserving.”The trees in your orchard say not so, nor the flocks in your pasture.They give that they may live, for to withhold is to perish.

~ Kahlil Gibran

What would it hurt for me to give that homeless guy a couple bucks? Who the hell cares if he spends it on beer? Maybe beer is a step up for him from the harder stuff that knocked him onto the streets in the first place. Maybe, just maybe, he’s actually going to spend it on food (homeless people do eat, right?). Maybe, he really is a desperate human being who is trying to change his situation.

~ Dan Pearce

Charity is to be measured, not by what one has given away, but by what one has left.

~ Fulton J. Sheen

Charity you can give even when you haven't got.

~ Bernard Malamud

Charity is injurious unless it helps the recipient to become independent of it.

~ John D. Rockefeller

When you judge yourself for needing help, you judge those you are helping. When you attach value to giving help, you attach value to needing help.

~ Brené Brown

He knew why he and the other children received ice cream only when newspaper photographers came to visit, and why food and clothing donated for the children got furtively resold outside the orphanage gate.

~ Katherine Boo

The instructive admonitions, “give an account of thy stewardship,“—“occupy till I come;” are forgotten. Thus the generous and wakeful spirit of Christian Benevolence, seeking and finding every where occasions for its exercise, is exploded, and a system of decent selfishness is avowedly established in its stead; a system scarcely more to be abjured for its impiety, than to be abhorred for its cold insensibility to the opportunities of diffusing happiness.

~ William Wilberforce

Charity sees the need, not the cause.

~ German Proverb

Africa was full of people in need of help and there had to be a limit. You simply could not help everybody; but you could at least help those who came into your life. That principle allowed you to deal with the suffering you saw. That was your suffering. Other people would have to deal with the suffering that they, in their turn, came across.

~ Alexander Mccall Smith

If I had not grown up in Nigeria- and if all I knew of Africa were of popular images- I too would think that africa was a place of beautiful landscapes, beautiful animals and incomprehensible people fighting sensless wars, dying of poverty and aids- unable to speak for themselves and waiting to be saved by a kind white foreigner.

~ Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

In every human act of charity, something larger, greater, divine has come down to visit the act.

~ Geoffrey Wood

Lets toil under the sun to build poles of love. And let our roots be planted like strong trees that strong winds can't move.

~ Auliq Ice

Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.

~ Hugh Nibley

Be sure that you give the poor the aid they most need, though it be your example which leaves them far behind. If you give money, spend yourself with it, and do not merely abandon it to them.

~ Henry David Thoreau

There are two things you should know about the poor: they tend to smell, and they are ungrateful.

~ Dorothy Day

Once the demands of necessity and propriety have been met, the rest that one owns belongs to the poor.

~ Pope Leo Xiii

If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man with no shirt.

~ Ambrose Of Milan

Frequently give up some of your property by giving it with a generous heart to the poor ... It is true that God will repay us not only in the next world but even in this.

~ Francis De Sales

Imagine for a moment that life has given you everything you dream about, but you won’t be happy, because happiness comes when you pursue your dreams, otherwise it is not your dream, but charity.

~ M.f. Moonzajer

From 15 to 18 is an age at which one is very sensitive to the sins of others, as I know from recollections of myself. At that age you don’t look for what is hidden. It is a sign of maturity not to be scandalized and to try to find explanations in charity.

~ Flannery O'connor

On the wall of Amshad's office there was a poster that made me laugh: DO NOT GIVE ME A BANGLE, GIVE ME A PEN. Well-meaning charities often train illiterate slum women to make cheap trinkets.

~ Edward Luce

It’s much harder to twist the charitable arm of a lottery winner compared to that of a man at his lowest ebb. It sounds like the wrong way round at first, but when you really put your nut to it, people are more frightened of losing the big shit than of having fuck all to begin with and losing a bit of that.

~ Carla H. Krueger

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.

To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.

~ Abraham Lincoln

Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.

~ Terry Goodkind