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dfe3610
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In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.
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gratitude
compassion
generosity
service
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Elizabeth Gilbert |
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4ab94da
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It's important that what thoughts you are feeding into your mind because your thoughts create your belief and experiences. You have positive thoughts and you have negative ones too. Nurture your mind with positive thoughts: kindness, empathy, compassion, peace, love, joy, humility, generosity, etc. The more you feed your mind with positive thoughts, the more you can attract great things into your life.
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experiences
mind
thoughts
kindness
joy
empathy
compassion
inspiration
inspirational-quotes
inspire
life-quotes
living
motivation
optimistic
positive-affirmation
positive-life
inspiring
positive
positive-thinking
motivational
optimism
life
love
inspirational
generosity
belief
humility
peace
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Roy T. Bennett |
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59337d6
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Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth
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kindness
goodness
love
truth
wisdom
inspirational
generosity
anger
knowledge
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Siddh?rtha Gautama |
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199807c
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Because when you love something, you want to do it all the time, even if no one is paying you for it. At least that's how I felt about drawing.
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samantha
generosity
art
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Meg Cabot |
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59810fd
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People who love themselves come across as very loving, generous and kind; they express their self-confidence through humility, forgiveness and inclusiveness.
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kindness
inspirational
self-love
generosity
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Sanaya Roman |
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a6f1724
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Do not neglect to show hospitality to strangers, for by doing that some have entertained angels without knowing it.
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inspirational
guests
hospitality
generosity
strangers
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Anonymous |
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8f0592f
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Practice giving things away, not just things you don't care about, but things you do like. Remember, it is not the size of a gift, it is its quality and the amount of mental attachment you overcome that count. So don't bankrupt yourself on a momentary positive impulse, only to regret it later. Give thought to giving. Give small things, carefully, and observe the mental processes going along with the act of releasing the little thing you liked. (53) (Quote is actually Robert A F Thurman but Huston Smith, who only wrote the introduction to my edition, seems to be given full credit for this text.)
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non-attachment
releasing
giving
generosity
practice
simplicity
gift
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Huston Smith |
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5cef7f8
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Very often the test of one's allegiance to a cause or to a people is precisely the willingness to stay the course when things are boring, to run the risk of repeating an old argument just one more time, or of going one more round with a hostile or (much worse) indifferent audience. I first became involved with the Czech opposition in 1968 when it was an intoxicating and celebrated cause. Then, during the depressing 1970s and 1980s I was a member of a routine committee that tried with limited success to help the reduced forces of Czech dissent to stay nourished (and published). The most pregnant moment of that commitment was one that I managed to miss at the time: I passed an afternoon with Zdenek Mlynar, exiled former secretary of the Czech Communist Party, who in the bleak early 1950s in Moscow had formed a friendship with a young Russian militant with an evident sense of irony named Mikhail Sergeyevitch Gorbachev. In 1988 I was arrested in Prague for attending a meeting of one of Vaclav Havel's 'Charter 77' committees. That outwardly exciting experience was interesting precisely because of its almost Zen-like tedium. I had gone to Prague determined to be the first visiting writer not to make use of the name Franz Kafka, but the numbing bureaucracy got the better of me. When I asked why I was being detained, I was told that I had no need to know the reason! Totalitarianism is itself a cliche (as well as a of pulverizing boredom) and it forced the cliche upon me in turn. I did have to mention Kafka in my eventual story. The regime fell not very much later, as I had slightly foreseen in that same piece that it would. (I had happened to notice that the young Czechs arrested with us were not at all frightened by the police, as their older mentors had been and still were, and also that the police themselves were almost fatigued by their job. This was totalitarianism practically yawning itself to death.) A couple of years after that I was overcome to be invited to an official reception in Prague, to thank those who had been consistent friends through the stultifying years of what 'The Party' had so perfectly termed 'normalization.' As with my tiny moment with Nelson Mandela, a whole historic stretch of nothingness and depression, combined with the long and deep insult of having to be pushed around by boring and mediocre people, could be at least partially canceled and annealed by one flash of humor and charm and generosity.
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irony
history
humour
politics
1968
1970s
1980s
1988
allegiance
arrest
bad-crowds
charter-77
gorbachev
kafka
nelson-mandela
vaclav-havel
zdenek-mlynar
prague
moscow
czechoslovakia
arguments
exile
commitment
bureaucracy
boredom
clichés
generosity
dissent
totalitarianism
detention
mediocrity
charm
russia
communism
loyalty
police
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Christopher Hitchens |
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678b6c0
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I mean a man whose hopes and aims may sometimes lie (as most men's sometimes do, I dare say) above the ordinary level, but to whom the ordinary level will be high enough after all if it should prove to be a way of usefulness and good service leading to no other. All generous spirits are ambitious, I suppose, but the ambition that calmly trusts itself to such a road, instead of spasmodically trying to fly over it, is of the kind I care for.
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work
usefulness
generosity
diligence
contentment
service
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Charles Dickens |
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a4dd955
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You know, Emily was a selfish old woman in her way. She was very generous, but she always wanted a return. She never let people forget what she had done for them - and, that way she missed love.
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love
generosity
selfishness
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Agatha Christie |
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aaff25d
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God comes right out and tells us why he gives us more money than we need. It's not so we can find more ways to spend it. It's not so we can indulge ourselves and spoil our children. It's not so we can insulate ourselves from needing God's provision. It's so we can give and give generously (2 Corinthians 8:14; 9:11)
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money
spoil
less
spending
more
excess
stewardship
giving
sharing
generosity
selfishness
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Randy Alcorn |
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4c676fe
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In a pocket of his knapsack he'd found a last half packet of cocoa and he fixed it for the boy and then poured his own cup with hot water and sat blowing at the rim. You promised not to do that, the boy said. What? You know what, Papa. He poured the hot water back into the pan and took the boy's cup and poured some of the cocoa into his own and then handed it back. I have to watch you all the time, the boy said.
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sacrifice
love
generosity
selflessness
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Cormac McCarthy |
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4b4db23
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They looked at me, and were so full of delight in the pleasure they were giving me that some final thread of resistance gave way and I understood not only how entirely generous they were but also that generosity might be the greatest pleasure there is.
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kindness
happiness
generosity
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William Maxwell |
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7105a21
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I began to enjoy my own generosity; I felt the pleasure of pleasing others, especially as this was accompanied by money-power. I was paying for them; they were grateful, they had to be; and they could no longer see me as a failure.
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money
fake-people
fake-friends
generosity
power
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Hanif Kureishi |
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a84d07d
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The three jewels of Tao: compassion, moderation, and humility. Balthasar said compassion leads to courage, moderation leads to generosity, and humility leads to leadership.
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courage
leadership
tao
generosity
moderation
humility
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Christopher Moore |
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d948f48
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Ah, they said. Que bueno. And after and for a long time to come he'd have reason to evoke the recollection of those smiles and to reflect upon the good will which provoked them for it had power to protect and to confer honor and to strengthen resolve and it had power to hear men and to bring them to safety long after all other resources were exhausted.
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friendship
generosity
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Cormac McCarthy |
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36dbedc
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The most powerful thought is a prayerful thought. When I'm praying for you, I am praying for my own peace of mind. I can only have for myself what I am willing to wish for you.
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prayer
kindness
empathy
compassion
blessings-quotes
peace-of-mind
prayer-quotes
prayerful-habits
prayerful-life
prayers-answered
wish-creation
wishes-fulfilled
power-of-love
giving
charity
sharing
generosity
selflessness
prosperity
inner-peace
thoughtful
power-of-thoughts
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Marianne Williamson |
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c108817
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"I am deserving of no gifts." "That is so. But you must recall, Severian, that when a gift is deserved, it is not a gift but payment."
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deserving
gene-wolfe
generosity
gifts
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Gene Wolfe |
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5ea3d09
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"If the secret core of potlatch is the reciprocity of exchange, why is this reciprocity not asserted directly, why does it assume the "mystified" form of two consecutive acts each of which is staged as a free voluntary display of generosity? Here we encounter the paradoxes of forced choice, of freedom to do what is necessary, at its most elementary: I have to do freely what I am expected to do. (If, upon receiving a gift, I immediately return it to the giver, this direct circulation would amount to an extremely aggressive gesture of humiliation, it would signal that I refused the other's gifts -- recall those embarrassing moments when elderly people forget and give us last year's present once again ... ) ...the reciprocity of exchange is in itself thoroughly ambiguous; at its most fundamental, it is destructive of the social bond, it is the logic of revenge, tit for tat. To cover this aspect of exchange, to make it benevolent and pacific, one has to pretend that each person's gift is free and stands on its own. This brings us to potlatch as the "pre-economy of the economy," its zero-level, that is, exchange as the reciprocal relation of two non-productive expenditures. If the gift belongs to Master and exchange to the Servant, potlatch is the paradoxical exchange between Masters. Potlach is simultaneously the zero-level of civility, the paradoxical point at which restrained civility and obscene consumption overlap, the point at which it is polite to behave impolitely."
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revenge
freedom
potlatch
generosity
politeness
gifts
vengeance
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Slavoj Žižek |
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3317004
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Every man in the chapel hoped that when his hour came he, too, would be eulogized, which is to say forgiven, and that all of his lapses, greeds, errors, and strayings from the truth would be invested with coherence and looked upon with charity. This was perhaps the last thing humans could give each other and it was what they demanded, after all, of the Lord.
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death
eulogies
funerals
generosity
remembrance
forgiveness
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James Baldwin |
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165ce4e
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We have power as consumers. We can exercise that power all the time by not choosing to invest time, energy or funds to support the production of mass media images that do not reflect life-enhancing values, that undermine a love ethic.
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humanity
change
optimism
love
consummerism
generosity
society
principles
values
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bell hooks |