Giving quotes
21.9K quotes on this topic — from poets, philosophers, and thinkers across history.
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Browse quotes that often appear alongside giving — connected by shared ideas and recurring themes.
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"Nobody wanted your dance, Nobody wanted your strange glitter, your floundering Drowning life and your effort to save yourself, Treading water, dancing the dark turmoil, Looking for something to give."
"A sympathetic person is placed in the dilemma of a swimmer among drowning men, who all catch at him, and if he gives so much as a leg or a finger, they will drown him."
"The power men possess to annoy me I give them by a weak curiosity"
"Manners are the happy ways of doing things; each one a stroke of genius or of love, now repeated and hardened into usage, they form at last a rich varnish, with which the routine of life is washed, and its details adorned. If they are superficial, so are the dew-drops which give such a depth to the morning meadows."
"[R]est assured that, when you remain thus in the state in which obedience has placed you, the merit of this same obedience extends over everything you do, giving each action inestimable value, even when things do not turn out as you wish."
"I see more and more that my work goes infinitely better when I am properly fed, and the paints are there, and the studio and all that... I wish I could manage to make you really understand that when you give money to artists, you are yourself doing an artist's work, and that I only want my pictures to be of such a quality that you will not be too dissatisfied with your work."
"Nature makes us poor only when we want necessaries, but custom gives the name of poverty to the want of superfluities."
"Let him that desires to see others happy, make haste to give while his gift can be enjoyed, and remember that every moment of delay takes away something from the value of his benefaction."
"Almost any biographer, if he respects facts, can give us much more than another fact to add to our collection. He can give us the creative fact; the fertile fact; the fact that suggests and engenders."
"...William wondered why he always disliked people who said 'no offense meant.' Maybe it was because they found it easier to to say 'no offense meant' than actually to refrain from giving offense."
"(About sweeping).... What he was in FACT doing was moving the dirt around with a broom, to give it a change of scenery and a chance to make new friends."
"The more we seek gratitude, the more reason the angels will give us for gratitude and joy to exist in our lives."
"I've grown up on a diet of metaphors. If young writers would find those writers who can give them metaphors by the bushel and the peck, then they'll become better writers - to learn how to capsualize things and present them in metaphorical form."
"A work of art has no importance whatever to society. It is only important to the individual, and only the individual reader is important to me. I don't give a damn for the group, the community, the masses, and so forth."
"Give me a few minutes to talk away my face and I can seduce the Queen of France."
"We are mandating forces to hold regular neighbourhood beat meetings. These meetings will give local people the chance to scrutinise the work of their local police."
"Not only does silence give us a chance to understand ourselves better, to get a truer and more balanced perspective on our own lives in relation to the lives of others: silence makes us whole if we let it. Silence helps draw together the scattered and dissipated energies of a fragmented existence."
"His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept."
"The secrets that the characters hold are held back from the audience, and that's such a delight to hold onto. When you're playing scenes, it gives you an inner dialogue that allows you to really immerse yourself as the actor, in every scene that you're playing. Nothing felt expositional. Nothing felt like we were just doing it to move the story along. There was a reason these characters were saying what they're saying. It was a gift, really."
"Whenever somebody reaches above their own limitations - I always tell people, the best time to go give is when you have nothing."
