Quotes About Altruism

Leibniz dedicated his life to efforts to educate people to understand that true happiness is found by locating their identity in benefitting mankind and their posterity.

People who are self-denying and selfless have little to offer to others.

However, while it may be true that the open-air stalls did help get the economy going again to some degree and feed some of the hungry masses (government rationing being so inadequate that a Tokyo District Court judge who refused to eat anything purchased illegally died of malnutrition), the men who ran them were anything but altruistic.

What there is to be proud of? One answer is: Darwin-like behavior. Go above and beyond the call of a smoothly functioning conscience; help those who aren´t likely to help you in return, and do so when nobody is watching

The evolutionary fusion of hierarchy and reciprocal altruism accounts for a good part of the average human life. Many, if not most, of our swings in mood, our fateful commitments, our changes of heart about people, institutions, even ideas, are governed by mental organs that this fusion wrought. It has done much to form the texture of everyday existence.

In the end, boundless empathy is what utilitarianism is.

It's true that Darwin didn't live the optimally utilitarian life. No one ever has. Still, as he prepared to die, he could rightly have reflected on a life decently and compassionately lived, a string of duties faithfully discharged, a painful, if only partial, struggle against the currents of selfishness whose source he was the first man to see. It wasn't a perfect life; but human beings are capable of worse.

So, yes, we need to reject the core evolutionary value of the specialness of self. Indeed, there's probably never been a time in human history when this rejection was more vital.

Every small, unselfish action nudges the world into a better path.

Patience had once counseled me that the best way to stop pitying myself was to do something for someone else.

a way that contributes to the good of the whole.

communal generosity

Wealth meant having enough to give away, social status elevated by generosity.

and there. Sometimes she gave

A woman who helps others helps herself.

I love the way Beck loves. If everyone loved like she did, the world would be a better place.

We give because we love, not because we fear. When we give with love, we can disconnect from how things are received. Only the act of pure giving is important.

Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.

A grower of turnups Or shaper of clay, a commot Farmer or a king-Every man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone.

man is a hero if he strives more for others than for himself alone. Once," he added, "you told me that the seeking counts more than the finding. So, too, must the striving count more than the gain.

From another: ". . . Jonas was kind of like Jesus because he took the pain for everyone else in the community so they wouldn't have to suffer. And, at the very end of the book, when Jonas and Gabe reached the place that they knew as Elsewhere, you described Elsewhere as if it were heaven.

You try to give away what you want yourself.

it indicates a deep confusion of thinking to mistake one's own discomfort for a benefit to another.

He recognized the feeling for what it was - the need within him to protect and care for something beyond himself. It was that in part that these past years had led him to fight so many fights that were not his. And yet, was not the cause of human liberty and freedom always every man's trust? (A Man Called Trent, chapter 1)