#benevolence

Oddly my name has been no professional help at all! It seems to have made no difference. I admire him hugely, both for his benevolence and his enormous psychological perception. ↗

— Joanna Trollope

#been #benevolence #both #difference #enormous

Peace is not an absence of war, it is a virtue, a state of mind, a disposition for benevolence, confidence, justice. ↗

— Baruch Spinoza

#absence #benevolence #confidence #disposition #justice

Alas few socialists are either benevolent enough to work hard at these occupations out of benevolence or self-interested enough to work hard at them for money. ↗

— John McCarthy

#benevolence #benevolent #either #enough #few

To remove ignorance is an important branch of benevolence. ↗

— Ann Plato

#branch #ignorance #important #remove

There is no truer cause of unhappiness amongst men than, where naturally expecting charity and benevolence, they receive harm and vexation. ↗

— Francois Rabelais

#benevolence #cause #charity #expecting #harm

A monarchy conducted with infinite wisdom and infinite benevolence is the most perfect of all possible governments. ↗

— Ezra Stiles

#conducted #governments #infinite #monarchy #most

In strange and uncertain times such as those we are living in, sometimes a reasonable person might despair. But hope is unreasonable and love is greater even than this. May we trust the inexpressible benevolence of the creative impulse. ↗

— Robert Fripp

#creative #creativity #despair #hope #love

Service is a smile.  It is an acknowledging wave, a reaching handshake, a friendly wink, and a warm hug.   It's these simple acts that matter most, because the greatest service to a human soul has always been the kindness of recognition. ↗

— Richelle E. Goodrich

#charity #compassion #friendliness #giving #inspirational

[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

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