97 Charity Quotes For Inspiration

In a world that often feels divided, the act of giving back can serve as a powerful reminder of our shared humanity. Whether you're seeking motivation to kickstart your own charitable endeavors or simply looking for a dose of positivity, the right words can inspire action and kindness. We've curated a collection of the top 97 charity quotes to ignite your passion for helping others. Dive in and let these timeless pearls of wisdom uplift your spirit and encourage you to make a difference, no matter how big or small.

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. “It's not how much we give but how much love we put into giving.” - Mother Theresa

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

6. “A bone to the dog is not charity. Charity is the bone shared with the dog, when you are just as hungry as the dog.” - Jack London

7. “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

8. “The most treasured and sacred moments of our lives are those filled with the spirit of love. The greater the measure of our love, the greater is our joy. In the end, the development of such love is the true measure of success in life.” - Joseph B. Wirthlin

9. “Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” - Martin Luther King Jr.

10. “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

11. “What's the point of doing something good if nobody's watching?” - Nicole Kidman

12. “We only have what we give.” - Isabel Allende

13. “No one has ever become poor by giving.” - Anne Frank

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

15. “I have often wondered, Sir, [. . .] to observe so few Instances of Charity among Mankind; for tho' the Goodness of a Man's Heart did not incline him to relieve the Distresses of his Fellow-Creatures, methinks the Desire of Honour should move him to it. What inspires a Man to build fine Houses, to purchase fine Furniture, Pictures, Clothes, and other things at a great Expence, but an Ambition to be respected more than other People? Now would not one great Act of Charity, one Instance of redeeming a poor Family from all the Miseries of Poverty, restoring an unfortunate Tradesman by a Sum of Money to the means of procuring a Livelihood by his Industry, discharging an undone Debtor from his Debts or a Goal, or any such Example of Goodness, create a Man more Honour and Respect than he could acquire by the finest House, Furniture, Pictures or Clothes that were ever beheld? For not only the Object himself who was thus relieved, but all who heard the Name of such a Person must, I imagine, reverence him infinitely more than the Possessor of all those other things: which when we so admire, we rather praise the Builder, the Workman, the Painter, the Laceman, the Taylor, and the rest, by whose Ingenuity they are produced, than the Person who by his Money makes them his own.” - Henry Fielding

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

17. “He wondered why the pelican was the symbol of charity, except it was that it wanted a good deal of charity to admire a pelican.” - G.K. Chesterton

18. “What virtue is there in a man who demonstrates goodness because he has been bred to it? It is his habit from youth. But a man who has known unkindness and want, for him to be kind and charitable to those who have been the cause of his misfortunes, that is a virtuous man.” - Deanna Raybourn

19. “Thus, when we plead for the gift of charity, we aren't asking for lovely feelings toward someone who bugs us or someone who has injured or wounded us. We are actually pleading for our very natures to be changed, for our character and disposition to become more and more like the Savior's, so that we literally feel as He would feel and thus do what He would do.” - Sheri L. Dew

20. “You know, that man has a spirit, that each man and woman is unique, that we have duty to promote our unalienable rights and to protect them, that we have a duty to our families and ourselves, to take care of ourselves, to contribute to charity, that we have a duty to support a just and righteous law that is stable and predictable.” - Mark R. Levin

21. “But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,' faltered Scrooge, who now began to apply this to himself.Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. "Mankind was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were, all, my business. The deals of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!” - Charles Dickens

22. “They say a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. I took mine and fell flat on my face. As a young woman, I dreamed of changing the world. In my twenties, I went to africa to try and save the continent, only to learn that Africans neither wanted nor needed saving. Indeed, when I was there, I saw some of the worst that good intentions, traditional charity, and aid can produce...I concluded that if I could only nudge the world a little bit, maybe that would be enough.But nudging isn't enough.” - Jacqueline Novogratz

23. “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

24. “It didn´t occur to me until later that there´s another truth, very simple: greed in a good cause is still greed.” - Stephen King

25. “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

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

27. “When we want to help the poor, we usually offer them charity. Most often we use charity to avoid recognizing the problem and finding the solution for it. Charity becomes a way to shrug off our responsibility. But charity is no solution to poverty. Charity only perpetuates poverty by taking the initiative away from the poor. Charity allows us to go ahead with our own lives without worrying about the lives of the poor. Charity appeases our consciences.” - Muhammad Yunus

28. “That is one of the bitter curses of poverty; it leaves no right to be generous.” - George Gissing

29. “Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.” - William Blake

30. “So, ministers say that they teach charity. This is natural. They live on alms. All beggars teach that others should give.” - Robert Green Ingersoll

31. “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

32. “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

33. “God, who needs nothing, loves into existence wholly superfluous creatures in order that He may love and perfect them. He creates the universe, already foreseeing - or should we say "seeing"? there are no tenses in God - the buzzing cloud of flies about the cross, the flayed back pressed against the uneven stake, the nails driven through the mesial nerves, the repeated incipient suffocation as the body droops, the repeated torture of back and arms as it is time after time, for breath's sake, hitched up. If I may dare the biological image, God is a "host" who deliberately creates His own parasites; causes us to be that we may exploit and "take advantage of" Him. Herein is love. This is the diagram of Love Himself, the inventor of all loves.” - C.S. Lewis

34. “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

35. “But charity is the PURE LOVE OF CHRIST, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him.Moroni 7” - The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints

36. “Very well. He'd lighten up. As a matter of fact, he felt as light as the bubbly froth that flew from the lips of the waves. Whatever else his long, unprecedented life might have been, it had been fun. Fun! If others should find that appraisal shallow, frivolous, so be it. To him, it seemed now to largely have been some form of play. And he vowed that in the future he would strive to keep that sense of play more in mind, for he'd grown convinced that play--more than piety, more than charity or vigilance--was what allowed human beings to transcend evil.” - Tom Robbins

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

38. “We believe that only government has the capacity--not to mention the political and moral responsibility--to promote the general welfare. Father Kramer as quoted in Sweet Charity?” - Janet Poppendieck

39. “In college I took a social psychology course, something I thought useful for a career in advertising. Psychologists tested the story of the Good Samaritan. What they learned gives us reason to pause. The greatest determinant of who stopped to help the stranger in need was not compassion, morality, or religious creed. It was those who had the time. Makes me wonder if I have time to do good. Apparently, Angel does.” - Richard Paul Evans

40. “The inconsistencies that haunt our relationships with animals also result from the quirks of human cognition. We like to think of ourselves as the rational species. But research in cognitive psychology and behavioral economics shows that our thinking and behavior are often completely illogical. In one study, for example, groups of people were independently asked how much they would give to prevent waterfowl from being killed in polluted oil ponds. On average, the subjects said they would pay $80 to save 2,000 birds, $78 to save 20,000 birds, and $88 to save 200,000 birds. Sometimes animals act more logically than people do; a recent study found that when picking a new home, the decisions of ant colonies were more rational than those of human house-hunters. What is it about human psychology that makes it so difficult for us to think consistently about animals? The paradoxes that plague our interactions with other species are due to the fact that much of our thinking is a mire of instinct, learning, language, culture, intuition, and our reliance on mental shortcuts.” - Hal Herzog

41. “When we give cheerfully and accept gratefully, everyone is blessed.” - Maya Angelou

42. “You will find out that Charity is a heavy burden to carry, heavier than the kettle of soup and the full basket. But you will keep your gentleness and your smile. It is not enough to give soup and bread. This the rich can do. You are the servant of the poor, always smiling and good-humored. They are your masters, terribly sensitive and exacting master you will see. And the uglier and the dirtier they will be, the more unjust and insulting, the more love you must give them. It is only for your love alone that the poor will forgive you the bread you give to them.” - vincent de paul

43. “Having leveled my palace, don't erect a hovel and complacently admire your own charity in giving me that for a home.” - Emily Brontë

44. “To ease another’s heartache is to forget one’s own.” - Abraham Lincoln

45. “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

46. “Charity degrades those who receive it and hardens those who dispense it.” - George Sand

47. “Carve your name on hearts, not tombstones. A legacy is etched into the minds of others and the stories they share about you.” - Shannon Alder

48. “I gave him everything from my lunches I hate, which is called Charity.” - David James Duncan

49. “Indolent and unworthy the beggar may be—but that is not your concern: It is better, said Joseph Smith, to feed ten impostors than to run the risk of turning away one honest petition.” - Hugh Nibley

50. “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

51. “As they were walking, a beggar came up, holding his hand out and crying, "Baksheesh! Baksheesh!"Mike kept on going but Mitchell stopped. Digging into his pocket, he pulled out twenty paise and placed it in the beggar's dirty hand.Mike said, "I used to give to beggars when I first came here. But then I realized, it's hopeless. It never stops.""Jesus said you should give to whoever asks you," Mitchell said."Yeah, well," Mike said, "obviously Jesus was never in Calcutta.” - Jeffrey Eugenides

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

53. “In a world plagued with commonplace tragedies, only one thing exists that truly has the power to save lives, and that is love.” - Richelle Goodrich

54. “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

55. “I interviewed my dad on video in his final weeks. When I asked about his work and finding meaning through helping others, he responded, "I don't think you can be focused on, 'Oh gee, I want to make a difference.' It has to be spontaneous. If it's not...there's some kind of egotistical thing going on. That's a red flag. You hope you impact people on the deepest level you are capable of at the time. Sometimes you hit it, sometimes you don't. You're trying.” - Lisa Shannon

56. “Many love humanity only in order to forget God with a clear conscience.” - Nicolás Gómez Dávila

57. “Once you go on welfare it changes you. Even if you get off welfare, you never escape the stigma that you were a charity case. You're scarred for life.” - Jeannette Walls

58. “One important aspect of justice, Jose Miranda reminds us, involves the restoration of what has been stolen. Giving food to the hungry or clothing to the naked is not a charitable handout but an exercise in simple justice - restoring to the poor what is rightfully theirs, what has been taken from them unjustly.” - Robert McAfee Brown

59. “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

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

61. “... love for our neighbours does not die the minute we enter heaven, it intensifies.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

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

63. “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

64. “Cuando haces una obra de caridad, on en mi caso de solidaridad, te sientes con derecho a ser como eres y tener lo que tienes. Ya pagaste tu impuesto, ¿ajá?” - Xavier Velasco

65. “I realize the simple truth is that power isn’t control at all- power is strength, and giving that strength to others. A leader isn’t someone who forces others to make him stronger; a leader is someone willing to give his strength to others so that they may have the strength to stand on their own.” - Beth Revis

66. “Our prayers for others flow more easily than those for ourselves. This shows we are made to live by charity.” - C.S. Lewis

67. “I believe when you integrate charity in your craft and not just think of the fame and riches it would entitle you with, you will feel this true sense of fulfillment. Carry on your mission, of where God destined you to be- to use His gifts in good ways and not just for yourself.” - Elizabeth E. Castillo

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

69. “From the standpoint of the upper classes, the system had many merits. They felt that what was paid out of the poor rate was charity, and therefore a proof of their benevolence; at the same time, wages were kept at starvation level by a method which just prevented discontent from developing into revolution...It was plainly the certainty, derived from the old Poor Law, that actual death would be averted by the parish authorities, which induced the rural poor of England to endure their misery patiently...it taught them respect for their 'betters'.While leaving all the wealth that they produced, beyond the absolute minimum required for subsistence, in the hands of the landowners and farmers. It was at this period that landowners built the sham Gothic ruins called 'follies', where they indulged in romantic sensibility about the past while they filled the present with misery and degradation.” - Bertrand Russell

70. “Saint Augustine … insisted that scripture taught nothing but charity. Whatever the biblical author may have intended, any passage that seemed to preach hatred and was not conducive to love must be interpreted allegorically and made to speak of charity.” - Karen Armstrong

71. “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

72. “Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah said, "Where there is no money, there is no learning." The rabbis explain that unless people's stomachs are full and satisfied, they cannot study, grow spiritually, and do good works.” - H.W. Charles

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

74. “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

75. “...a great man who is vicious will only be a great doer of evil, and a rich man who is not liberal will be only a miserly beggar; for the possessor of wealth is not made happy by possessing it, but by spending it - and not by spending as he please but by knowing how to spend it well. To the poor gentleman there is no other way of showing that he is a gentleman than by virtue, by being affable, well-bred, courteous, gentle-mannered and helpful; not haughty, arrogant or censorious, but above all by being charitable...and no one who sees him adorned with the virtues I have mentioned, will fail to recognize and judge him, though he know him not, to be of good stock.” - Miguel Cervantes

76. “In words which can still bring tears to the eyes, St. Augustine describes the desolation into which the death of his friend Nebridius plunged him (Confessions IV, 10). Then he draws a moral. This is what comes, he says, of giving one’s heart to anything but God. All human beings pass away. Do not let your happiness depend on something you may lose. If love is to be a blessing, not a misery, it must be for the only Beloved who will never pass away.” - C.S. Lewis

77. “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

78. “It is not what you leave to your children that matters, but what you leave in them.” - Shannon L. Alder

79. “The Three D's of Creating True Happiness For All.......Declutter - Remove all unwanted items from your home,Donate - to your local charity, Deduct - Save money by claiming your donation on your tax return” - Christina Scalise

80. “This much is true: When you are about to effect the lives of hundreds of people, Satan will do everything he can to prevent it from happening. Often pride and anger are his best assassins.” - Shannon L. Alder

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

82. “I hate these affairs", he'd told her once, tearing up an engraved invitation to an exclusive charity ball. "They're the worst kind of discrimination. An invitation doesn't really mean that you're invited; it means that a whole lot of people aren't” - Melinda Cross

83. “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

84. “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

85. “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

86. “Every sunrise is an invitation for us to arise and brighten someone's day.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

87. “Kindness is a currency that can cover a multitude of interpersonal debts.” - George Alexiou

88. “Success follows those who champion a cause greater than themselves.” - George Alexiou

89. “If you have two shirts in your closet, one belongs to you and the other to the man with no shirt.” - St. Ambrose

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

91. “Let us make our way through these low valleys of the humble and little virtues. We shall see in them the roses amid the thorns, charity that shows its beauty among interior and exterior afflictions, the lilies of purity.” - St. Francis de Sales

92. “I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was cold and you clothed me; come, possess the kingdom prepared for you from the foundation of the world.' He who is the the King of the poor and of kings will say this at His great judgment.” - St. Francis de Sales

93. “The body is poisoned through the mouth, even so is the heart through the ear ... And even if we do mean no harm, the Evil One means a great deal, and he will use those idle words as a sharp weapon against some neighbor's heart.” - St. Francis de Sales

94. “Truly it is a blessed thing to love on earth as we hope to love in Heaven, and to begin that friendship here which is to endure for ever there.” - St. Francis de Sales

95. “Examine your heart often to see if it is such toward your neighbor as you would like his to be toward you were you in his place. This is the touchstone of true reason.” - St. Francis de Sales

96. “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

97. “Our possessions are not ours- God has given them to us to cultivate, that we may make them fruitful and profitable in His Service, and so doing we shall please Him.” - St. Francis de Sales