Quotes about Needs

What you realize when you work in the philanthropic world is that people aren't just numbers: they are families with real needs and you need to make your judgments with kindness and thoughtfulness in order to serve those needs.

By interpreting freedom as the propagation and immediate gratification of needs, people distort their own nature, for they engender in themselves a multitude of pointless and foolish desires, habits, and incongruous stratagems. Their lives are motivated only by mutual envy, sensuality, and ostentation.

We have a duty to meet our spouse in their need. Correspondingly, we also have a Christian duty not to demand too much of our spouse.

Leslie now says, "God is the perfect Husband. He has met my needs before I even anticipated them. I'm not just talking about big things either; he has met my small, personal needs in very intimate ways.

She began by reminding me of the scriptural injunction that the ox grinding the corn must not be kept from enjoying the grain. Did I think God felt less about His human workers? Hadn't I better examine myself to be sure I was not nursing a Sacrificial Spirit? Wasn't I claiming to depend upon God, but living as if my needs would be met by my own scrimping?

This is what Jesus had in mind: folks coming together, forming close-knit communities and meeting each other's needs-- no kings, no major welfare systems, no presidents necessary. His is a theology and practice for the people of God, not a set of suggestions for empire.

True generosity is measured not by how much we give away but by how much we have left, especially when we look at the needs of our neighbors. We have no right not to be charitable. The early Christians taught that charity is merely returning what we have stolen. In the seventeenth century, St. Vincent de Paul said that when he gives bread to the beggars, he gets on his knees and asks forgiveness from them.

Your house is made by its own needs. Those others are made by the need to impress. The determining motive of your house is in the house. The determining motive of the other is in the audience.

It [is] that courage that Africa most desperately needs.

A wife had greater wants, naturally, and could do nothing to help her own situation.

Satisfied needs do not motivate.

Satisfied needs do not motivate. It's only the unsatisfied need that motivates. Next to physical survival, the greatest need of a human being is psychological survival—to be understood, to be affirmed, to be validated, to be appreciated.