Whom does it benefit?
I gaze upon the thousand stars
That fill the midnight sky;
And wish, so passionately wish,
A light like theirs on high.
I have such eagerness of hope
To benefit my kind;
I feel as if immortal power
Were given to my mind. [ Miss Landon ]
The last benefit is most remembered. [ Proverb ]
A beggar pays a benefit with a louse. [ Proverb ]
Upbraiding turns a benefit into an injury. [ Proverb ]
We must not stint
Our necessary actions, in the fear
To cope malicious censurers; which ever,
As ravenous fishes, do a vessel follow
That is new trimmed, but benefit no further
Than vainly longing. [ William Shakespeare, Henry VIII ]
He that requites a benefit pays a great debt. [ Proverb ]
That which is so universal as death must be a benefit. [ Schiller ]
Night is the benefit of nature, and made for man's rest. [ Livy ]
There's no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers. [ Seneca ]
There is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers. [ Proverb ]
A benefit is estimated according to the mind of the giver. [ Seneca ]
If God were not a necessary being of Himself,
He might almost seem to be made for the use and benefit of men. [ John Tillotson ]
He that gives to a worthy person bestows a benefit upon himself. [ Proverb ]
The constancy of the benefit of the year in their seasons argues a Diety. [ English Proverb, collected by George Herbert ]
The best benefit we derive from history is the enthusiasm which it excites. [ Johann Wolfgang von Goethe ]
He who knows not how to bestow a benefit is unreasonable if he expects one. [ Publius Syrus ]
He is beneficent who acts kindly, not for his own benefit, but for another's. [ Cicero ]
Where you confer a benefit on those worthy of it, you confer a favour on all. [ Publius Syrus ]
The precepts of philosophy effect not the least benefit to one confirmed in fear. [ Hitopadesa ]
It is by the benefit of letters that absent friends are in a manner brought together. [ Seneca ]
Parents deserve reproof when they refuse to benefit their children by severe discipline. [ Petronius Arbiter ]
A benefit consists not in what is done or given, but in the intention of the giver or doer. [ Seneca ]
Pity is not enough better than indifference to benefit materially either agent or recipient. [ Charles H. Parkhurst ]
The memory of a benefit soon vanishes, but the remembrance of an injury sticks fast in the heart. [ Proverb ]
The mean man suffers more from his selfishness than he from whom meanness withholds some important benefit. [ Emerson ]
Many benefit by the caresses they have not inspired; many a vulgar reality serves as a pedestal to an ideal idol. [ T. Gautier ]
Much of the pleasure, and all the benefit of conversation, depends upon our own opinion of the speaker's veracity. [ Paley ]
We should be more anxious that our afflictions should benefit us than that they should be speedily removed from us. [ Robert Hall ]
The greatest of all human benefits, that at least without which no other benefit can be truly enjoyed, is independence. [ Parke Godwin ]
His calumny is not only the greatest benefit a rogue can confer on us, but the only service he will perform for nothing. [ Lavater ]
Most people who commit a sin count on some personal benefit to be derived therefrom, but profanity has not even this excuse. [ Hosea Ballou ]
Those who injure one party to benefit another are quite as unjust as if they converted the property of others to their own benefit. [ Cicero ]
We should give as we receive, cheerfully, quickly, and without hesitation; for there is no grace in a benefit that sticks to the fingers. [ Seneca ]
Riches, though they may reward virtues, yet they cannot cause them; he is much more noble who deserves a benefit than he who bestows one. [ Feltham ]
That immense majority, the fools, who made the laws that regulate the manners of the world, very naturally made them for their own benefit.
He is ungrateful who denies a benefit; he is ungrateful who hides it; he is ungrateful who does not return it; he, most of all, who has forgotten it. [ Seneca ]
Government is a trust, and the officers of the government are trustees; and both the trust and the trustees are created for the benefit of the people. [ H. Clay ]
There is this benefit in brag, that the speaker is unconsciously expressing his own ideal. Humor him by all means, draw it all out, and hold him to it. [ Emerson ]
A good library is an anchor to keep a young man from roving, and a helm to aid an old man to gain the greatest possible benefit from what remains of the breeze. [ W. D. Haley ]
Whatever professes to benefit by pleasing must please at once. The pleasures of the mind imply something sudden and unexpected; that which elevates must always surprise. [ Dr. Johnson ]
The unknown! It is the field in which are sown our dreams, where we see them germinate, grow, and bloom. Who would live without the benefit of the incertitude granted to our miseries. [ E. Souvestre ]
The avaricious man is like the barren sandy ground of the desert, which sucks in all the rain and dews with greediness, but yields no fruitful herbs or plants for the benefit of others. [ Zeno ]
It is good to be unselfish and generous; but don't carry that too far. It will not do to give yourself to be melted down for the benefit of the tallowtrade; you must know where to find yourself. [ George Eliot ]
Of riches it is not necessary to write the praise. Let it, however, be remembered that he who has money to spare has it always in his power to benefit others, and of such power a good man must always be desirous. [ Johnson ]
He is the rich man who can avail himself of all men's faculties. He is the richest man who knows how to draw a benefit from the labors of the greatest number of men, - of men ia distant countries and in past times. [ Emerson ]
Men cannot benefit those that are with them as they can benefit those that come after them; and of all the pulpits from which human voice is ever sent forth, there is none from which it reaches so far as from the grave. [ Ruskin ]
Frugality is good if liberality be joined with it. The first is leaving off superfluous expenses; the last is bestowing them to the benefit of others that need. The first without the last begets covetousness; the last without the first begets prodigality. [ William Penn ]
I have never taken any exercise, except sleeping and resting, and I never intend to take any. Exercise is loathsome. And it cannot be any benefit when you are tired; and I was always tired. But let another person try my way, and see where he will come out. [ Mark Twain, Seventieth Birthday speech ]
Nothing is more estimable than a physician who, having studied nature from his youth, knows the properties of the human body, the diseases which assail it, the remedies which will benefit it, exercises his art with caution, and pays equal attention to the rich and the poor. [ Voltaire ]
Custom is a violent and treacherous school mistress. She, by little and little, slyly and unperceived, slips in the foot of her authority; but having by this gentle and humble beginning, with the benefit of time, fixed and established it, she then unmasks a furious and tyrannic countenance, against which we have no more the courage or the power so much as to lift up our eyes. [ Montaigne ]
There is a story of some mountains of salt in Cumana, which never diminished, though carried away in much abundance by merchants; but when once they were monopolized to the benefit of a private purse, then the salt decreased, till afterward all were allowed to take of it, when it had a new access and increase. The truth of this story may be uncertain, but the application is true; he that envies others the use of his gifts decays then, but he thrives most that is most diffusive. [ Spencer ]