Lavishness is not generosity. [ Proverb ]

Generosity is the flower of justice. [ Hawthorne ]

One can love any man that is generous. [ Leigh Hunt ]

God blesses still the generous thought
And still the fitting word He speeds,
And truth, at His requiring taught,
He quickens into deeds. [ Whittier ]

Generosity should never exceed ability. [ Cicero ]

Watch lest prosperity destroy generosity. [ Beecher ]

Generosity, wrong placed, becomes a vice.

Generosity is more charitable than wealth. [ Joseph Roux ]

Generosity is but the pity of noble souls. [ Chamfort ]

Generosity is only benevolence in practice. [ Bishop Ken ]

The truly generous is the truly wise;
And he who loves not others, lives unblest. [ Horace ]

Bounty, being free itself, thinks all others so. [ William Shakespeare ]

Our generosity never should exceed our abilities. [ Cicero ]

A giving hand, though foul, shall have fair praise. [ William Shakespeare ]

Almost always the most indigent are the most generous. [ Stanislaus ]

Humanity is the virtue of a woman, generosity of a man. [ Adam Smith ]

Good-humor is allied to generosity, ill-humor to meanness. [ Greville ]

Generosity is the part of the soul raised above the vulgar. [ Goldsmith ]

Even covetous men have sometimes their intervals of generosity. [ Proverb ]

It is not enough to help the feeble up, but to support him after. [ William Shakespeare ]

The secret pleasure of a generous act is the great mind's great bribe. [ Dryden ]

Bounty always receives part of its value from the manner it is bestowed. [ Dr. Johnson ]

Generosity, to be perfect, should always be accompanied by a dash of humor. [ Marie Ebner-Eschenbach ]

Some are unwisely liberal; and more delight to give presents than to pay debts. [ Sir P. Sidney ]

In this world, it is not what we take up, but what we give up, that makes us rich. [ Beecher ]

Generosity is the accompaniment of high birth; pity and gratitude are its attendants. [ Corneille ]

Generosity, wrong placed, becometh a vice; a princely mind will undo a private family. [ Fuller ]

The world takes, from even the most candid heart, the freshness of faith and generosity. [ George Sand ]

If there be any truer measure of a man than by what he does, it must be by what he gives. [ South ]

For his bounty, there was no winter in it; an autumn it was that grew the more by reaping. [ William Shakespeare ]

To be humble to our superiors is duty; to our equals, courtesy; to our inferiors, generosity. [ Owen Feltham ]

They that do an act that does deserve requital pay first themselves the stock of such content. [ Sir Robert Howard ]

O the world is but a word; were it all yours to give it in a breath, how quickly were it gone! [ Shakespeare ]

How much easier it is to be generous than just! Men are sometimes bountiful who are not honest. [ Junius ]

To give awkwardly is churlishness. The most difficult part is to give, then why not add a smile? [ La Bruyere ]

There were in him candor and generosity, which, unless tempered by due moderation, lead to ruin. [ Tacitus ]

Courage is generosity of the highest order, for the brave are prodigal of the most precious things. [ Colton ]

No one ever sowed the grain of generosity who gathered not up the harvest of the desire of his heart. [ Saadi ]

Men of the noblest dispositions think themselves happiest when others share their happiness with them. [ Duncan ]

What seems generosity is often disguised ambition, that despises small to run after greater interests. [ Rochefoucauld ]

Many men have been capable of doing a wise thing, more a cunning thing, but very few a generous thing. [ Alexander Pope ]

Let us proportion our alms to our ability, lest we provoke God to proportion His blessings to our alms. [ Beveridge ]

Any one may do a casual act of good-nature; but a continuation of them shows it a part of the temperament. [ Sterne ]

In giving, a man receives more than he gives; and the more is in proportion to the worth of the thing given. [ George MacDonald ]

It is a pleasure appropriate to man for him to save a fellow-man, and gratitude is acquired in no better way. [ Ovid ]

Every trait of beauty may be traced to some virtue, as to innocence, candor, generosity, modesty, and heroism. [ St. Pierre ]

The generous who is always just, and the just who is always generous, may, unannounced, approach the throne of heaven. [ Lavater ]

To be generous, guiltless, and of a free disposition is to take those things for bird-bolts that you deem cannonbullets. [ William Shakespeare ]

When you give, take to yourself no credit for generosity, unless you deny yourself something in order that you may give. [ Henry Taylor ]

A really great man is known by three signs - generosity in the design, humanity in the execution, and moderation in success. [ Bismarck ]

He who gives what he would as readily throw away gives without generosity: for the essence of generosity is in self-sacrifice. [ Henry Taylor ]

True delicacy, as true generosity, is more wounded by an offence from itself - if I may be allowed the expression - than to itself. [ Greville ]

The possession of a library, or the free use of it, no more constitutes learning, than the possession of wealth constitutes generosity. [ S. Smiles ]

Wherever I find a great deal of gratitude in a poor man, I take it for granted there would be as much generosity if he were a rich man. [ Pope ]

Gruel men are the greatest lovers of mercy, avaricious men of generosity, and proud men of humility; that is to say, in others, not in themselves. [ Colton ]

Generosity, when once set going, knows not how to stop; as the more familiar we are with the lovely form, the more enamored we become of her charms. [ Pliny the Younger ]

There is a greatness in being generous, and there is only simple justice in satisfying creditors. Generosity is the part of the soul raised above the vulgar. [ Goldsmith ]

Obstinacy is the strength of the weak. Firmness founded upon principle, upon the truth and right, order and law, duty and generosity, is the obstinacy of sages. [ Lavater ]

Generosity during life is a very different thing from generosity in the hour of death; one proceeds from genuine liberality and benevolence, the other from pride or fear. [ Horace Mann ]

Good-humor will sometimes conquer ill-humor, but ill-humor will conquer it oftener; and for this plain reason, good-humor must operate on generosity, ill-humor on meanness. [ Greville ]

Generosity is catching: and if so many escape it, it is somewhat for the same reason that countrymen escape the smallpox - because they meet with no one to give it to them. [ Lord Greville ]

All my experience of the world teaches me that in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred the safe side and the just side of a question is the generous side and the merciful side. [ Mrs. Jameson ]

True generosity is a duty as indispensably necessary as those imposed upon us by the law. It is a rule imposed upon us by reason, which should be the sovereign law of a rational being. [ Goldsmith ]

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 ]

A friend to everybody is often a friend to nobody, or else in his simplicity he robs his family to help strangers, and becomes brother to a beggar. There is wisdom in generosity, as in everything else. [ Spurgeon ]

Every fiction since Homer has taught friendship, patriotism, generosity, contempt of death. These are the highest virtues; and the fictions which taught them were therefore of the highest, though not of unmixed, utility. [ Sir J. Mackintosh ]

Some men find happiness in gluttony and in drunkenness, but no delicate viands can touch their taste with the thrill of pleasure, and what generosity there is in wine steadily refuses to impart its glow to their shriveled hearts. [ Whipple ]

He that gives all, though but little, gives much; because God looks not to the quantity of the gift, but to the quality of the givers; he that desires to give more than he can hath equaled his gift to his desire, and hath given more than he hath. [ Quarles ]

There are few souls who are so vigorously organized as to be able to maintain themselves in the calm of a strong resolve: all honest consciences are capable of the generosity of a day, but almost all succumb the next morning under the effort of the sacrifice. [ George Sand ]

One great reason why men practice generosity so little in the world is their finding so little there. Generosity is catching; and if so many men escape it, it is in a great degree from the same reason the countrymen escape the smallpox, - because they meet no one to give it to them. [ Greville ]

Quality and title have such allurements that hundreds are ready to give up all their own importance, to cringe. to flatter, to look little, and to pall every pleasure in constraint, merely to be among the great, though without the least hopes of improving their understanding or sharing their generosity. They might be happier among their equals. [ Goldsmith ]

The reputation of generosity is to be purchased pretty cheap; it does not depend so much upon a man's general expense, as it does upon his giving handsomely where it is proper to give at all. A man, for instance, who should give a servant four shillings would pass for covetous, while he who gave him a crown would be reckoned generous; so that the difference of those two opposite characters turns upon one shilling. [ Chesterfield ]

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 ]

Gratitude is a link between justice and love. It discharges by means of affections those debts which the affections only can discharge, and which are so much the more sacred for this reason. Gratitude never springs up in the soil of selfishness, for self-interest in its eagerness to appropriate is unable to understand the impulses of generosity or to measure the true value of the gift. And, when we do understand it, we must love much to be willing to accept, we refuse when we love but little. Gratitude is the justice of the heart. [ Degerando ]