Generosity Quotes

Give all thou canst; high Heaven rejects the lore of nicely calculated less or more.

William Wordsworth (1770-1850) English poet.

Liberality  consists less in giving a great deal than in gifts well timed.

Jena de la Bruyere (1645-1696) French writer, moralist.

What is called generosity is usually only the vanity of giving; we enjoy the vanity more than the thing given.

We must be aware of the dangers which lie in our most generous wishes. Some paradox of our nature leads us, when once we have made our fellow men the objects of our enlightened interest, to go on to make them the objects of our pity, then of our wisdom ultimately of our coercion.

Lionel Trilling (1905-1975) American critic

As for the largest hearted of us, what is the word we write most often in our chequebooks? “Self”

Eden Philpotts (1862-1960) British author.

Don’t be selfish. If you have something you do not want, and know someone who has no use for it, give. In this way you can be generous without expenditure of self-denial and also help another to be the same.

Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915) American author.

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

It’s better to give than to lend, and it costs about the same.

Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them.

Duncan.

True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed on us by law. It is a rule imposed by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being.

Goldsmith.

Generosity, wrong placed, becometh a vice; a princely mind will undo a private family.

Fuller.

True generosity does not consist in obeying every impulse of humanity, in following blind passion for our guide, and impairing our circumstances by present benefactions, so as to render us incapable of future ones.

Goldsmith.

There is wisdom in generosity, as in everything else. A friend to everybody is often a friend to nobody; or else, in his simplicity, he robs his family to help strangers, and so becomes brother to a beggar.

Spurgeon.

For his bounty, there was no winter in’t; an autumn ‘twas that grew the more by reaping.

Shakespeare.

As the sword of the best tempered metal is most flexible, so the truly generous are most pliant and courteous in their behavior to their inferiors.

Fuller.

The generous who is always just, and the just who is always generous, may, unannounced, approach the throne of heaven.

Lavater.

He that gives all, though but little, give much; because God looks not to the quanity of the gift, but to the quality if the givers.

Quarles.

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.

Horace Mann.

A generous man places the benefits he confers beneath his feet; those he receives, nearest his heart.

One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world is, their finding so little there; generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason that countrymen escape the smallpox, because they meet with no one to give it them.

The truly generous is the truly wise, and he who loves not others, lives unblest.

Home.

Generosity is the accompaniment of high birth; pity and gratitude are its attendants.

Corneille.

Some are unwisely liberal, and more delight to give presents than to pay debts.

Sir P.Sidney.

A man there was, an they called him mad; the more he gave, the more he had.

Bunyan.

What I gave, I have; what I spent, I had; what I kept, I lost.

Old Epitaph.