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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"What you are saying is true of those who want everything to give way to them, nothing to oppose them, everything to go their way, people to obey them without comment or delay and, in a manner of speaking, to be adored."
"They chatter together like birds on Cypress Hill, but all they say is 'Live, live, live, live, live!' It's all they've learned, it's the only advice they can give."
"Lord, how you afflict your lovers! But everything is small in comparison to what you give them afterwards."
"A soul which gives itself to prayer, either much or little, should on no account be kept within narrow bounds."
"I fear the Greeks, even when they bring gifts."
"I do not want to be admired. I want to give, to be given, and solitude in which to unfold my possessions."
"London perpetually attracts, stimulates, gives me a play and a story and a poem, without any trouble, save that of moving my legs through the streets... To walk alone through London is the greatest rest."
"You can't go around building a better world for people. Only people can build a better world for people. Otherwise it's just a cage. Besides you don't build a better world by choppin' heads off and giving decent girls away to frogs."
"[Y]ou weren't born with a talent for witchcraft: it didn't come easily; you worked hard at it because you wanted it. You forced the world to give it to you, no matter the price, and the price is and always will be high... People say you don't find witchcraft; witchcraft finds you. But you've found it, even if at the time you didn't know what it was you were finding, and you grabbed it by its scrawny neck and made it work for you."
"Evil has only the power we give it."
"This was all he wanted now. Some signs that the immense world would accept him and give him the long time he needed to think all the things that must be thought."
"The world doesn't give a damn about you unless you do something. Those are the rules; I didn't make them. If you are lazy, if you don't get the work that you love done, the world won't care if you die tomorrow and go into the grave and are gone and forgotten forever."
"Those who advocate total lack of regulation, those who advocate lawlessness in the business world, themselves give the strongest impulse to what I believe would be the deadening movement toward unadulterated state socialism."
"Give, expecting nothing there of."
"I labor, I spend, I strive, I design, I love, I cling, I uphold, I give way, I envy, I long, I scorn, I die, I hide, I want. Faster, much faster than any man could make the tally."
"When life gives you lemons... choke on them and die... you stupid lemon eater."
"I try to avoid giving advice."
"The declaration that religious faith shall be unpunished does not give immunity to criminal acts dictated by religious error."
"For if I am to love truly and freely, I must be able to give something that is truly my own to another. If my heart does not first belong to me, how can I give it to another?"
"We know when we are following our vocation when our soul is set free from preoccupation with itself and is able to seek God and even to find Him, even though it may not appear to find Him. Gratitude and confidence and freedom from ourselves: these are signs that we have found our vocation and are living up to it even though everything else may seem to have gone wrong. They give us peace in any suffering. They teach us to laugh at despair. And we may have to."
