42 Quotes On Service

In a world that thrives on connection and community, acts of service stand as powerful testaments to our shared humanity. Whether it's lending a helping hand, offering a listening ear, or providing guidance, service has the unique ability to transform lives—not just for those who receive, but for those who give. To inspire and motivate, we’ve gathered a collection of 42 impactful quotes on service. Each quote encapsulates the essence of giving and the profound impact it can have. Join us as we delve into words of wisdom from thinkers, leaders, and everyday heroes who remind us of the beauty and significance of serving others.

1. “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” - Walt Whitman

2. “Everybody can be great...because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

3. “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” - Mahatma Gandhi

4. “Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” - Marian Wright Edelman

5. “The best antidote I know for worry is work. The best cure for weariness is the challenge of helping someone who is even more tired. One of the great ironies of life is this: He or she who serves almost always benefits more than he or she who is served.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

6. “Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.” - W.H. Auden

7. “Remember that yours is not the only heart that may be wishing for love.” - Cameron Dokey

8. “Though my work may be menial, though my contribution may be small, I can perform it with dignity and offer it with unselfishness. My talents may not be great, but I can use them to bless the lives of others.... The goodness of the world in which we live is the accumulated goodness of many small and seemingly inconsequential acts.” - Gordon B. Hinckley

9. “We are not called upon to do all the good that is possible, but only that which we can do.” - Theodore Guerin

10. “When you are able to shift your inner awareness to how you can serve others, and when you make this the central focus of your life, you will then be in a position to know true miracles in your progress toward prosperity.” - Wayne W. Dyer

11. “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.” - Charles Dickens

12. “People of excellence go the extra mile to do what's right.” - Joel Osteen

13. “When you find yourself in need of spiritual nourishment, it is in the opportunities to serve others that you will find the abundance you seek.” - Steve Maraboli

14. “Miss no single opportunity of making some small sacrifice, here by a smiling look, there by a kindly word; always doing the smallest right and doing it all for love.” - St. Therese of Lisieux

15. “Love is not patronizing and charity isn't about pity, it is about love. Charity and love are the same -- with charity you give love, so don't just give money but reach out your hand instead.” - Mother Teresa

16. “We love those whom we serve (p. 26)” - Richard Paul Evans

17. “The soldier is the Army. No army is better than its soldiers. The Soldier is also a citizen. In fact, the highest obligation and privilege of citizenship is that of bearing arms for one’s country” - George S. Patton Jr.

18. “When we attempt to clear up the mess others have made, or when we love the unlovely, we demonstrate the kind of weirdness God likes. We give the lie to the evolutionary survival of the fittest maxim...” - Ann Benton

19. “Our obligations to our country never cease but with our lives. - John Adams” - David McCullough

20. “There’s one thing about getting somebody to help you though…you got to take whatever it looks like - their kind of help. And you can’t be choosin what you like and don’t like. Help is a take it or leave it kind of thing, and if you can’t take it like it comes, might as well leave it, cause it’s gonna be more trouble than it’s worth.” - Todd Johnson

21. “Power is to be used in the service of others and only secondarily, if at all, for the benefit of oneself.” - Duane Elmer

22. “Man is a fallen star till he is right with heaven: he is out of order with himself and all around him till he occupies his true place in relation to God. When he serves God, he has reached that point where he doth serve himself best, and enjoys himself most. It is man's honour, it is man's joy, it is man's heaven, to live unto God.” - Charles H. Spurgeon

23. “The advantages of a hereditary Monarchy are self-evident. Without some such method of prescriptive, immediate and automatic succession, an interregnum intervenes, rival claimants arise, continuity is interrupted and the magic lost. Even when Parliament had secured control of taxation and therefore of government; even when the menace of dynastic conflicts had receded in to the coloured past; even when kingship had ceased to be transcendental and had become one of many alternative institutional forms; the principle of hereditary Monarchy continued to furnish the State with certain specific and inimitable advantages.Apart from the imponderable, but deeply important, sentiments and affections which congregate around an ancient and legitimate Royal Family, a hereditary Monarch acquires sovereignty by processes which are wholly different from those by which a dictator seizes, or a President is granted, the headship of the State. The King personifies both the past history and the present identity of the Nation as a whole. Consecrated as he is to the service of his peoples, he possesses a religious sanction and is regarded as someone set apart from ordinary mortals. In an epoch of change, he remains the symbol of continuity; in a phase of disintegration, the element of cohesion; in times of mutability, the emblem of permanence. Governments come and go, politicians rise and fall: the Crown is always there. A legitimate Monarch moreover has no need to justify his existence, since he is there by natural right. He is not impelled as usurpers and dictators are impelled, either to mesmerise his people by a succession of dramatic triumphs, or to secure their acquiescence by internal terrorism or by the invention of external dangers. The appeal of hereditary Monarchy is to stability rather than to change, to continuity rather than to experiment, to custom rather than to novelty, to safety rather than to adventure.The Monarch, above all, is neutral. Whatever may be his personal prejudices or affections, he is bound to remain detached from all political parties and to preserve in his own person the equilibrium of the realm. An elected President – whether, as under some constitutions, he be no more than a representative functionary, or whether, as under other constitutions, he be the chief executive – can never inspire the same sense of absolute neutrality. However impartial he may strive to become, he must always remain the prisoner of his own partisan past; he is accompanied by friends and supporters whom he may seek to reward, or faced by former antagonists who will regard him with distrust. He cannot, to an equal extent, serve as the fly-wheel of the State.” - Harold Nicholson

24. “Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.” - Booker T. Washington

25. “A person's faith goes at its own pace. The trouble with church is the service. A service is conducted for a mass audience. Just when I start to like the hymn, everyone plops down to pray. Just when I start to hear the prayer, everyone pops up to sing. And what does the stupid sermon have to do with God? Who knows what God thinks of current events? Who cares?” - John Irving

26. “I see Jesus in every human being. I say to myself, this is hungry Jesus, I must feed him. This is sick Jesus. This one has leprosy or gangrene; I must wash him and tend to him. I serve becuase I love Jesus.” - Mother Teresa

27. “Words only reveal half of your heart. Service defines the other half. Character is the combination of the two.” - Shannon L. Alder

28. “I'm starting to think this world is just a place for us to learn that we need each other more than we want to admit.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

29. “Certainly, Gentlemen, it ought to be the happiness and glory of a representative to live in the strictest union, the closest correspondence, and the most unreserved communication with his constituents. Their wishes ought to have great weight with him; their opinions high respect; their business unremitted attention. It is his duty to sacrifice his repose, his /pleasure, his satisfactions, to theirs/, --- and above all, ever, and in all cases, to prefer their interest to his own.But his unbiased opinion, his mature judgement, his enlightened conscience, he ought not to sacrifice to you, to any man, or to any set of men living. These he does not derive from your pleasure, --- no, nor from the law and the Constitution. They are a trust from Providence, for the abuse of which he is deeply answerable. Your Representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays, instead of serving you, if he sacrifices it to your opinions.” - Edmund Burke

30. “When we replace a sense of service and gratitude with a sense of entitlement and expectation, we quickly see the demise of our relationships, society, and economy.” - Steve Maraboli

31. “Nothing disciplines the inordinate desires of the flesh like service, and nothing transforms the desires of the flesh like serving in hiddenness. The flesh whines against service but screams against hidden service. It strains and pulls for honour and recognition. It will devise subtle, religiously acceptable means to call attention to the service rendered. If we stoutly refuse to give in to this lust of the flesh, we crucify it. Every time we crucify the flesh, we crucify our pride and arrogance.” - Richard J. Foster

32. “Those who serve deserve.” - Orrin Woodward

33. “The greatest joys in life are found not only in what we do and feel, but also in our quiet hopes and labors for others.” - Bryant McGill

34. “My generosity must bear a cost or there’d be no value in what you gain from it. There’d be no second thought for me, the tiny, humble mankin who came to save you. Is it right for a desperate soul to expect redemption for nothing? No. No, no. So, tell me, child, what will you give me in exchange for my services?"- from "Dimpellumpzki” - Richelle E. Goodrich

35. “Graciousness in serving and being served marks the lives of leaders who have made the largest impact on my life.” - Sue Mallory

36. “Service is providing what's wanted, not what I'd like to give.” - Brian Klemmer

37. “As long as there are ways we can serve, then we have a job to do.” - Marianne Williamson

38. “The drums of Africa still beat in my heart. They will not let me rest while there is a single Negro boy or girl without a chance to prove his worth.” - Mary McLeod Bethune

39. “Service and gratitude will fuel your relationship; entitlement and expectation will poison it.” - Steve Maraboli

40. “The highest distinction is service to others.” - Max Brooks

41. “The world might stop in ten minutes; meanwhile, we are to go on doing our duty. The great thing is to be found at one's post as a child of God, living each day as though it were our last, but planning as though our world might last a hundred years.” - C.S. Lewis

42. “Balanced service is a virtue to be cherished. There is to be time in our life to serve God, to serve our family, to serve our country and community, to serve our employer. Wise persons budget available time so that no significant area of one's life falls into a state of neglect.” - Thomas S. Monson