#benevolence

[To have Faith in Christ] means, of course, trying to do all that He says. There would be no sense in saying you trusted a person if you would not take his advice. Thus if you have really handed yourself over to Him, it must follow that you are trying to obey Him. But trying in a new way, a less worried way. Not doing these things in order to be saved, but because He has begun to save you already. Not hoping to get to Heaven as a reward for your actions, but inevitably wanting to act in a certain way because a first faint gleam of Heaven is already inside you. ↗

— C.S. Lewis

#christianity #faith #obedience #faith

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

— Abraham Lincoln

#charity #dogs #generosity #hypocrisy #pets

The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer. ↗

— Mahatma Gandhi

#charity #compassion #kindness #acting

General benevolence, but not general friendship, made a man what he ought to be. ↗

— Jane Austen

#friendship #general #made #man #ought

Let the professors of Christianity recommend their religion by deeds of benevolence - by Christian meekness - by lives of temperance and holiness. ↗

— Richard Mentor Johnson

#christian #christianity #deeds #holiness #lives

It comes as no surprise to find [Norman] Mailer embracing [in the book On God] a form of Manicheanism, pitting the forces of light and darkness against each other in a permanent stand-off, with humanity as the battlefield. (When asked if Jesus is part of this battle, he responds rather loftily that he thinks it is a distinct possibility.) But it is at points like this that he talks as if all the late-night undergraduate talk sessions on the question of theism had become rolled into one. 'How can we not face up to the fact that if God is All-Powerful, He cannot be All-Good. Or She cannot be All-Good.' Mailer says that questions such as this have bedevilled 'theologians', whereas it would be more accurate to say that such questions, posed by philosophers, have attempted to put theologians out of business. A long exchange on the probability of reincarnation (known to Mailer sometimes as “karmic reassignment”) manages to fall slightly below the level of those undergraduate talk sessions. The Manichean stand-off leads Mailer, in closing, to speculate on what God might desire politically and to say: 'In different times, the heavens may have been partial to monarchy, to communism, and certainly the Lord was interested in democracy, in capitalism. (As was the Devil!)' I think it was at this point that I decided I would rather remember Mailer as the author of Harlot's Ghost and The Armies of the Night. ↗

— Christopher Hitchens

#capitalism #communism #democracy #devil #god

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

— Abraham Lincoln

#charity #public-service #volunteerism #service

A benevolent mind, and the face assumes the patterns of benevolence. An evil mind, then an evil face. ↗

— Jimmy Sangster

#benevolence #benevolent #evil #face #mind

For peace is not mere absence of war, but is a virtue that springs from, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. ↗

— Baruch Spinoza

#benevolence #confidence #disposition #justice #mere

Order and reason, beauty and benevolence, are characteristics and conceptions which we find solely associated with the mind of man. ↗