Great Throughts Treasury

"Never expect justice from a vain man; if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect." -

"Active beneficence is a virtue of easier practice than forbearance after having conferred, or than thankfulness after having received a benefit. I know not, indeed, whether it be a greater and more difficult exercise of magnanimity for the one party to act as if he had forgotten, or for the other as if he constantly remembered the obligation." - George Canning

"If you desire to be magnanimous, undertake nothing rashly, and fear nothing thou undertakes; fear nothing but infamy; dare anything but injury; the measure of magnanimity is neither to be rash nor timorous." - Francis Quarles

"Minds are conquered not by arms, but by love and magnanimity." -

"What do you call Love, Hate, Charity, Revenge, Humanity, Magnanimity, Forgiveness? Different results of the one Master Impulse: the necessity of securing one's self-approval." - Mark Twain, pen name of Samuel Langhorne Clemens

"I will this day try to live a simple, sincere, and serene life; repelling promptly every thought of discontent, anxiety, discouragement, impurity, and self-seeking; cultivating cheerfulness, magnanimity, charity, and the habit of holy silence; exercising economy in expenditure, carefulness in conversation, diligence in appointed service, fidelity to every trust, and a childlike trust in God." - John H. Vincent, fully John Heyl Vincent

"Never expect justice from a vain man; if he has the negative magnanimity not to disparage you, it is the most you can expect." - Washington Allston

"Magnanimity is above circumstance; and any virtue which depends on that is more of constitution than of principle." - Jane Porter

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." - Adlai Ewing Stevenson

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." -

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." -

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." -

"Knowledge alone is not enough. It must be leavened with magnanimity before it becomes wisdom." -

"If appeasing our enemies is not the answer, neither is hating them... Somewhere between the extremes of appeasement and hate there is a place for courage and strength to express themselves in magnanimity and charity, and this is the place we must find." - Alfred Whitney Griswold

"Minds are not conquered by arms, but by love and magnanimity." -

"Five things constitute perfect virtue: gravity, magnanimity, earnestness, sincerity, kindness." - Confucius, aka Kong Qiu, Zhongni, K'ung Fu-tzu or Kong Fuzi NULL

"Obstinacy, sir, is certainly a great vice; and in the changeful state of political affairs it is frequently the cause of great mischief. It happens, however, very unfortunately, that almost the whole line of the great and masculine virtues - constancy, gravity, magnanimity, fortitude, fidelity, and firmness - are closely allied to this disagreeable quality, of which you have so jut an abhorrence; and in their excess all these virtues very easily fall into it." - Edmund Burke

"Magnanimity in politics is not seldom the truest wisdom; and a great empire and little minds go ill together." - Edmund Burke

"To wrong those we hate is to add fuel to our hatred. Conversely, to treat an enemy with magnanimity is to blunt our hatred for him." - Eric Hoffer

"To be a philosopher is not merely to have subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity and trust." - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"Did you ever hear of a man who had striven all his life faithfully and singly towards an object, and in no measure obtained it? If a man constantly aspires, is he not elevated? Did ever a man try heroism, magnanimity, truth, sincerity, and find that there was no advantage in them - that it was a vain endeavor?" - Henry David Thoreau, born David Henry Thoreau

"The essence of friendship is entireness, a total magnanimity and trust." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Of all virtues, magnanimity is the rarest. There are a hundred persons of merit for one who willingly acknowledges it in another." - William Hazlitt

"Art, if it is to be reckoned as one of the great values of life, must teach men humility, tolerance, wisdom and magnanimity. The value of art is not beauty, but right action." - W. Somerset Maugham, fully William Somerset Maugham

"Like all of us sinners, General Betrishchev was endowed with many virtues and many defects. Both the one and the other were scattered through him in a sort of picturesque disorder. Self-sacrifice, magnanimity in decisive moments, courage, intelligence--and with all that, a generous mixture of self-love, ambition, vanity, petty personal ticklishness, and a good many of those things which a man simply cannot do without." - Nikolai Gogol, fully Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol or Nikolay Vasilyevich Gogol

"Scientists are sometimes suspected of arrogance. Carl Sagan commends to us by contrast the humility of the Roman Catholic Church which, as early as 1992, was ready to grant a pardon to Galileo and admit publicly that the Earth does indeed revolve around the Sun. We must hope that this outspoken magnanimity will not cause any offence or hurt to the supreme religious authority of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Abdel-Aziz Ibn Baaz who, according to Sagan, in 1993 issued an edict, or fatwa, declaring that the world is flat. Anyone of the round persuasion does not believe in God and should be punished. Arrogance? Scientists are amateurs in arrogance." - Richard Dawkins

"The greedy man is not content with a whole world set before him." - Sa'di (or Saadi), pen name of Abū-Muḥammad Muṣliḥ al-Dīn bin Abdallāh Shīrāzī, born Muslih-uddin NULL

"The famous courtesan Clarimonde died recently, as the result of an orgy which lasted eight days and eight nights. It was something infernally magnificent. They revived the abominations of the feasts of Belshazzar and Cleopatra. Great God! what an age this is in which we live! The guests were served by swarthy slaves speaking an unknown tongue, who to my mind had every appearance of veritable demons; the livery of the meanest among them might have served as a gala-costume for an emperor. There have always been current some very strange stories concerning this Clarimonde, and all her lovers have come to a miserable or a violent end. It has been said that she was a ghoul, a female vampire; but I believe that she was Beelzebub in person." - Théophile Gautier, fully Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier, aka Le Bon Theo

"If most of us are ashamed of shabby clothes and shoddy furniture, let us be more ashamed of shabby ideas and shoddy philosophies. . . . It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it." -

"The hanging gate, of something like trelliswork, was propped on a pole, and he could see that the house was tiny and flimsy. He felt a little sorry for the occupants of such a place--and then asked himself who in this world had a temporary shelter." - Murasaki Shikibu, aka Lady Murasaki

"From a Buddhist point of view, this is standing the truth on its head by considering goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity. It means shifting the emphasis from the worker to the product of work, that is, from the human to the sub-human, surrender to the forces of evil." - E. F. Schumacher, fully Ernst Friedrich "Fritz" Schumacher