52 Charity Quotes For Inspiration

In a world that constantly seeks compassion and kindness, charity remains a beacon of hope and a testament to the power of human generosity. Whether through small acts of kindness or grand gestures of goodwill, the spirit of giving enriches both the giver and the recipient. We've curated a collection of the top 52 charity quotes to inspire and motivate. These poignant words from various thought leaders, philanthropists, and everyday heroes will remind you of the profound impact that charity can have on individuals and communities alike. Let these quotes encourage you to embrace the joy of giving and inspire others to follow in your footsteps.

1. “I care not for a man's religion whose dog and cat are not the better for it.” - Abraham Lincoln

2. “In the end, though, maybe we must all give up trying to pay back the people in this world who sustain our lives. In the end, maybe it's wiser to surrender before the miraculous scope of human generosity and to just keep saying thank you, forever and sincerely, for as long as we have voices.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

3. “For attractive lips, speak words of kindness.For lovely eyes, seek out the good in people.For a slim figure, share your food with the hungry.For beautiful hair, let a child run his fingers through it once a day.For poise, walk with the knowledge you’ll never walk alone....We leave you a tradition with a future.The tender loving care of human beings will never become obsolete.People even more than things have to be restored, renewed, revived, reclaimed and redeemed and redeemed and redeemed.Never throw out anybody.Remember, if you ever need a helping hand, you’ll find one at the end of your arm.As you grow older, you will discover that you have two hands: one for helping yourself, the other for helping others.Your “good old days” are still ahead of you, may you have many of them.” - Sam levenson

4. “Doing nothing for others is the undoing of ourselves.” - Horace Mann

5. “There is no exercise better for the heart than reaching down and lifting people up.” - John Holmes

6. “There is not a man of us who does not at times need a helping hand to be stretched out to him, and then shame upon him who will not stretch out the helping hand to his brother.” - Theodore Roosevelt

7. “Don't judge without having heard both sides. Even persons who think themselves virtuous very easily forget this elementary rule of prudence.” - Josemaría Escrivá

8. “Charity, if you have the means, is a personal choice, but charity which is expected or compelled is simply a polite word for slavery.” - Terry Goodkind

9. “The simplest acts of kindness are by far more powerful then a thousand heads bowing in prayer.” - Mahatma Gandhi

10. “Fundraising is an extreme sport!” - Marc A. Pitman

11. “In the things that really matter--our covenants, the commandments, and following the prophet--we need to be completely united. In the non-essentials, we have our agency to handle things as we see fit. But, in all things, regardless of whether we make the same choices or not, we are to treat each other with dignity and respect, both of which are evidences of charity in our hearts and lives.” - Sheri L. Dew

12. “It's easy to run to others. It's so hard to stand on one's own record. You can fake virtue for an audience. You can't fake it in your own eyes. Your ego is your strictest judge. They run from it. They spend their lives running. It's easier to donate a few thousand to charity and think oneself noble than to base self-respect on personal standards of personal achievement. It's simple to seek substitutes for competence--such easy substitutes: love, charm, kindness, charity. But there is no substitute for competence.” - Ayn Rand

13. “Charity is the power of defending that which we know to be indefensible. Hope is the power of being cheerful in circumstances which we know to be desperate. It is true that there is a state of hope which belongs to bright prospects and the morning; but that is not the virtue of hope. The virtue of hope exists only in earthquake and eclipse. It is true that there is a thing crudely called charity, which means charity to the deserving poor; but charity to the deserving is not charity at all, but justice. It is the undeserving who require it, and the ideal either does not exist at all, or exists wholly for them. For practical purposes it is at the hopeless moment that we require the hopeful man, and the virtue either does not exist at all, or begins to exist at that moment. Exactly at the instant when hope ceases to be reasonable it begins to be useful.” - G.K. Chesterton

14. “If I murmur in the least at affliction, if I am in any way uncharitable, if I revenge my own case, if I do anything purely to please myself or omit anything because it is a great denial, if I trust myself, if I take any praise for any good which Christ does by me, or if I am in any way proud, I shall act as my own and not God’s.” - Jonathan Edwards

15. “God damn it, you've got to be kind.” - Kurt Vonnegut

16. “Neither fear nor self-interest can convert the soul. They may change the appearance, perhaps even the conduct, but never the object of supreme desire... Fear is the motive which constrains the slave; greed binds the selfish man, by which he is tempted when he is drawn away by his own lust and enticed (James 1:14). But neither fear nor self-interest is undefiled, nor can they convert the soul. Only charity can convert the soul, freeing it from unworthy motives.” - St. Bernard of Clairvaux

17. “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

18. “The principle of neighborhood at home always implies the principle of charity abroad. (pg. 260, The Idea of a Local Economy)” - Wendell Berry

19. “Charity even for one person does not make sense except in terms of an effort to love all Creation in response to the Creator's love for it.” - Wendell Berry

20. “تبسمك في وجه أخيك صدقة، وأمرك بالمعروف صدقة ونهيك عن المنكر صدقة، وإرشادك الرجل في أرض الضلال لك صدقة، ونصرك الرجل الرديء البصر لك صدقة، وإماطتك الحجر والشوك العظم عن الطريق لك صدقةSmiling in your brother’s face is an act of charity. So is enjoining good and forbidding evil, giving directions to the lost traveller, aiding the blind and removing obstacles from the path.(Graded authentic by Ibn Hajar and al-Albani: Hidaayat-ur-Ruwaah, 2/293)” - Anonymous

21. “Better the occasional faults of a government that lives in a spirit of charity than the consistent omissions of a government frozen in the ice of its own indifference.” - Franklin D. Roosevelt

22. “Once poverty is gone, we'll need to build museums to display its horrors to future generations. They'll wonder why poverty continued so long in human society - how a few people could live in luxury while billions dwelt in misery, deprivation and despair.” - Muhammad Yunus

23. “Those who are truly alive are kindly and unsuspecting in their human relationships and consequently endangered under present conditions. They assume that others think and act generously, kindly and helpfully, in accordance with the laws of life. This natural attitude, fundamental to healthy children as well as primitive man, inevitably represents a great danger in the struggle for a rational way of life as long as the emotional plague subsists, because the plague-ridden impute their own manner of thinking and acting to their fellow men. A kindly man believes that all men are kindly, while one infected with the plague believes that all men lie and cheat and are hungry for power. In such a situation, the living are at an obvious disadvantage. When they give to the plague-ridden they are sucked dry, then ridiculed or betrayed.” - Wilhelm Reich

24. “If you’re in the luckiest one per cent of humanity, you owe it to the rest of humanity to think about the other 99 per cent.” - Warren Buffett

25. “Charity is one of those remarkable words that helps to identify the fault lines of a culture.” - Janet Poppendieck

26. “Charity erodes the cultural prerequisites for a vigorous democracy.” - Janet Poppendieck

27. “You cannot be fair to others without first being fair to yourself.Know that a well-honed sense of justice is a measure of personal experience, and all experience is a measure of self.Know that the highest expression of justice is mercy.Thus, as the supreme judge in your own court, you must have compassion for yourself.Otherwise, cede your gavel.” - Vera Nazarian

28. “Take The Walk is not about individuals becoming great in order to impact the world, it is about discovering the greatness of individuals as they use what they already have to touch the lives of the dying, sick and poor. It is about normal people with careers, families, and responsibilities, asking 'How can what I already do and what I already am make a difference in lives half a world away?” - Hanson

29. “The Sikh gave him the money. When Menon asked for his address so that he could repay the man, the Sikh said that Menon owed the debt to any stranger who came to him in need, as long as he lived. The help came from a stranger and was to be repaid to a stranger.” - Robert Fulghum

30. “I feel obligated to point out, though, that I have always been a sucker for ideas I find aesthetically pleasing. The cosmic sweep of the thing - an interstellar kula chain - affirming the differences and at the same time emphasizing the similarities of all the intelligent races in the galaxy - tying them together, building common traditions... The notion strikes me as kind of fine.” - Roger Zelazny

31. “Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.” - Marcus Aurelius

32. “Love is wise; hatred is foolish. In this world, which is getting more and more closely interconnected, we have to learn to tolerate each other, we have to learn to put up with the fact that some people say things that we don't like. We can only live together in that way. But if we are to live together, and not die together, we must learn a kind of charity and a kind of tolerance, which is absolutely vital to the continuation of human life on this planet.” - Bertrand Russell

33. “Charity ain't giving people what you wants to give, it's giving people what they need to get.” - Terry Pratchett

34. “That's it. Love makes us all strong.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

35. “There comes a time in the development of every ego when it must love its neighbors or become a twisted and stunted personality.” - Joshua Loth Liebman

36. “Of the twelve companions of Thorin, ten remained. Fili and Kili had fallen defending him with shield and body, for he was their mother’s elder brother.” - J.R.R. Tolkien

37. “The rich world likes and wishes to believe that someone, somewhere, is doing something for the Third World. For this reason, it does not inquire too closely into the motives or practices of anyone who fulfills, however vicariously, this mandate.” - Christopher Hitchens

38. “Helping others carries its own rewards, the first of which is a return to humanity.” - Richard Paul Evans

39. “Jews highly value having an abundance of money for the sake of caring for their families and for helping the needy.” - H.W. Charles

40. “The one single use of things which we call our own is that they might be his who hath need of them.” - Thomas Hughes

41. “There are these amazing little seeds called compassion.  You should grow some.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

42. “God is the comic shepherd who gets more of a kick out of that one lost sheep once he finds it again than out of the ninety and nine who had the good sense not to get lost in the first place. God is the eccentric host who, when the country-club crowd all turned out to have other things more important to do than come live it up with him, goes out into the skid rows and soup kitchens and charity wards and brings home a freak show. The man with no legs who sells shoelaces at the corner. The old woman in the moth-eaten fur coat who makes her daily rounds of the garbage cans. The old wino with his pint in a brown paper bag. The pusher, the whore, the village idiot who stands at the blinker light waving his hand as the cars go by. They are seated at the damask-laid table in the great hall. The candles are all lit and the champagne glasses filled. At a sign from the host, the musicians in their gallery strike up "Amazing Grace.” - Frederick Buechner

43. “Fight vigorously against the wolves, but on behalf of the sheep, not against the sheep. And this you may do by inveighing against the laws and lawgivers, and yet at the same time observing these laws with the weak, lest they be offended, until they shall themselves recognize the tyranny, and understand their own liberty.” - Martin Luther

44. “That churchgoers do the lion's share of the charitable work in our communities is simply untrue. They get credit for it because they do a better job of tying the good works they do to their creed. But according to a 1998 study, 82% of volunteerism by churchgoers falls under the rubric of "church maintenance" activities -- volunteerism entirely within, and for the benefit of, the church building and immediate church community. As a result of this siphoning of volunteer energy into the care and feeding of churches themselves, most of the volunteering that happens out in the larger community -- from AIDS hospices to food shelves to international aid workers to those feeding the hungry and housing the homeless and caring for the elderly -- comes from the category of "unchurched" volunteers.” - Dale McGowan

45. “I am astonished at the pleasure one experiences in doing good; and I should be tempted to believe that what we call virtuous people have not so much merit as they lead us to suppose.” - Pierre Choderlos de Laclos

46. “We never think lightly of those who walk with us on our uphill days.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

47. “It takes a female to have a baby,It takes a woman to raise a child,It takes a mother to raise them correctly,It takes a warrior to show them how to change the world.” - Shannon L. Alder

48. “The mission sat in a converted store front on the corner of a medium-busy street. There was a small crowd gathered in front - no real surprise, since they gave out food and clothing, all all you had to do was spend a few moments of your life listening to the good reverend explain why you were going to Hell. It seemed like a pretty good bargain, even to me, but I wasn't hungry.” - Jeff Lindsay

49. “A single act of kindness is like a drop of oil on a patch of dry skin—seeping, spreading, and affecting more than the original need.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

50. “Charity you can give even when you haven't got.” - Bernard Malamud

51. “Ought we not to love dearly the neighbor, who truly represents to us the sacred Person of our Master? And is this not one of the most powerful motives we could have for loving each other with an ardently burning love?” - St. Francis de Sales

52. “Frequently give up some of your property by giving it with a generous heart to the poor ... It is true that God will repay us not only in the next world but even in this.” - St. Francis de Sales