Quotes on Service

Albert Einstein:
Only a life lived for others is a life worthwhile.

Try not to become a man of success but rather try to become a man of value.

Albert Schweitzer:
I don't know what your destiny will be, but one thing I do know: the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.

A man is truly ethical only when he obeys the compulsion to help all life which he is able to assist, and shrinks from injuring anything that lives.

Reverence for Life affords me my fundamental principle of morality, namely, that good consists in maintaining, assisting, and enhancing life and that to destroy, harm, or to hinder life is evil. Affirmation of the world -- that is affirmation of the will to live, which appears in phenomenal forms all around me -- is only possible for me in that I give myself out for other life.

Alex Noble:
If I have been of service, if I have glimpsed more of the nature and essence of ultimate good, if I am inspired to reach wider horizons of thought and action, if I am at peace with myself, it has been a successful day.

Ann Radcliffe:
One act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world.

Anne Frank:
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.

Antigonus of Sokho:
Do not be like servants who serve their masters expecting to receive a reward; be rather like servants who serve their master unconditionally, with no thought of reward.

Barbara Bush:
Giving frees us from the familiar territory of our own needs by opening our mind to the unexplained worlds occupied by the needs of others.

C. S. Lewis:
Of all tyrannies, a tyranny exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive. It may be better to live under robber barons than under omnipotent moral busybodies. The robber baron's cruelty may sometimes sleep, his cupidity may at some point be satiated; but those who torment us for our own good will torment us without end, for they do so with the approval of their own conscience.

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
Human life consists in mutual service. No grief, pain, misfortune, or "broken heart," is excuse for cutting off one's life while any power of service remains. But when all usefulness is over, when one is assured of an unavoidable and imminent death, it is the simplest of human rights to choose a quick and easy death in place of a slow and horrible one.
(Suicide Note, August 17, 1935)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman:
The first duty of a human being is to assume the right functional relationship to society -- more briefly, to find your real job, and do it.

Confucius:
He who wishes to secure the good of others, has already secured his own.

Edmund Burke:
Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little.

Eleanor Roosevelt:
When will our consciences grow so tender that we will act to prevent human misery rather than avenge it?

Emily Dickinson:
If I can stop one heart from breaking,I shall not live in vain.If I can ease one life the aching,Or cool one pain,Or help one fainting robinUnto his nest again,I shall not live in vain.

Eugene V. Debs:
Now my friends, I am opposed to the system of society in which we live today, not because I lack the natural equipment to do for myself but because I am not satisfied to make myself comfortable knowing that there are thousands of my fellow men who suffer for the barest necessities of life. We were taught under the old ethic that man's business on this earth was to look out for himself. That was the ethic of the jungle; the ethic of the wild beast. Take care of yourself, no matter what may become of your fellow man. Thousands of years ago the question was asked; ''Am I my brother's keeper?'' That question has never yet been answered in a way that is satisfactory to civilized society.
Yes, I am my brother's keeper. I am under a moral obligation to him that is inspired, not by any maudlin sentimentality but by the higher duty I owe myself. What would you think me if I were capable of seating myself at a table and gorging myself with food and saw about me the children of my fellow beings starving to death.
1908 speech

Felix Adler:
Ethical religion can be real only to those who are engaged in ceaseless efforts at moral improvement. By moving upward we acquire faith in an upward movement, without limit.

To care for anyone else enough to make their problems one's own, is ever the beginning of one's real ethical development.

George Bernard Shaw:
Perhaps the greatest social service that can be rendered by anybody to this country and to mankind is to bring up a family.

Helen Keller:
Happiness cannot come from without. It must come from within. It is not what we see and touch or that which others do for us which makes us happy; it is that which we think and feel and do, first for the other fellow and then for ourselves.

Herman Melville:
We cannot live for ourselves alone. Our lives are connected by a thousand invisible threads, and along these sympathetic fibers, our actions run as causes and return to us as results.

Horace Mann:
Be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity.
To the graduating class, 1859, Antioch University

James M. Barrie:
Those who bring sunshine into the lives of others, cannot keep it from themselves.

Jimmy Carter:
Government is a contrivance of human wisdom to provide for human wants. People have the right to expect that these wants will be provided for by this wisdom.

John F. Kennedy:
Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.

Lao-Tse:
Kindness in words creates confidence.Kindness in thinking creates profundity.Kindness in giving creates love.

Maimonides:
Anticipate charity by preventing poverty; assist the reduced fellow man, either by a considerable gift or a sum of money or by teaching him a trade or by putting him in the way of business so that he may earn an honest livelihood and not be forced to the dreadful alternative of holding out his hand for charity. This is the highest step and summit of charity's golden ladder.

Margaret Chase Smith:
My creed is that public service must be more than doing a job efficiently and honestly. It must be a complete dedication to the people and to the nation with full recognition that every human being is entitled to courtesy and consideration, that constructive criticism is not only to be expected but sought, that smears are not only to be expected but fought, that honor is to be earned, not bought.

Margaret Fuller:
If you have knowledge, let others light their candles in it.

Marian Wright Edelman:
Service is what life is all about.

Marian Wright Edelman:
You just need to be a flea against injustice. Enough committed fleas biting strategically can make even the biggest dog uncomfortable and transform even the biggest nation.

Marian Wright Edelman:
I'm doing what I think I was put on this earth to do. And I'm really grateful to have something that I'm passionate about and that I think is profoundly important.

We must not, in trying to think about how we can make a big difference, ignore the small daily differences we can make which, over time, add up to big differences that we often cannot foresee.

You're not obligated to win. You're obligated to keep trying to do the best you can every day.

Service is the rent we pay to be living. It is the very purpose of life and not something you do in your spare time.

It's time for greatness -- not for greed. It's a time for idealism -- not ideology. It is a time not just for compassionate words, but compassionate action.

A lot of people are waiting for Martin Luther King or Mahatma Gandhi to come back -- but they are gone. We are it. It is up to us. It is up to you.

Martin Luther King, Jr.:
An individual has not started living until he can rise above the narrow confines of his individualistic concerns to the broader concerns of all humanity.

Everybody can be great... because anybody can serve. You don't have to have a college degree to serve. You don't have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You only need a heart full of grace. A soul generated by love.

Mohandas K. Gandhi:
The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.

Ralph Waldo Emerson:
Religion is to do right. It is to love, it is to serve, it is to think, it is to be humble.
It is one of the most beautiful compensations of life, that no man can sincerely try to help another without helping himself.

Rick de Marinis:
Kings and cabbages go back to compost, but good deeds stay green forever.

Seneca:
There is as much greatness of mind in acknowledging a good turn, as in doing it.

Thomas Jefferson:
Too old to plant trees for my own gratification, I shall do it for my posterity.

Vaclav Havel:
Genuine politics -- even politics worthy of the name -- the only politics I am willing to devote myself to -- is simply a matter of serving those around us: serving the community and serving those who will come after us. Its deepest roots are moral because it is a responsibility expressed through action, to and for the whole.

Walter Reuther:
There is no greater calling than to serve your fellow men. There is no greater contribution than to help the weak. There is no greater satisfaction than to have done it well.

William E. Gladstone :
Never forget that the purpose for which a man lives is the improvement of the man himself, so that he may go out of this world having, in his great sphere or his small one, done some little good for his fellow creatures and labored a little to diminish the sin and sorrow that are in the world.

William Menninger:
Six essential qualities that are the key to success: Sincerity, personal integrity, humility, courtesy, wisdom, charity.

Sorry, I don't have the time to do custom quote searches or find the original source of quotes on this site. (I've collected them from many places, over much time, and don't always know.)