Quotes about Goodness

The past is no longer yours; the future is not yet in your power. You have only the present wherein to do good.

It is in our power to stretch out our arms and, by doing good in our actions, to seize life and set it in our soul.

Oh! how amazing it is that people can talk so much about men's power and goodness, when if God did not hold us back every moment, we should be devils incarnate!

A gentle word, a kind look, a good-natured smile can work wonders and accomplish miracles.

Christians find in God a source of moral strength that helps us to lead better lives than those we would have led without Him, still it would be arrogant and ignorant to claim that unbelievers don't often lead good moral lives—in fact, sometimes lives that put ours to shame.

God is unwearied Patience, a Meekness that cannot be provoked; he is an ever-enduring Mercifulness; he is unmixed Goodness, impartial, universal Love; his Delight is in the Communication of himself, his own Happiness, to every thing, according to its Capacity. He does every thing that is good, righteous and lovely, for its own sake, because it is good, righteous, and lovely. He is the Good from which nothing but Good cometh, and resisteth all Evil, only with Goodness.

If, therefore, God be our greatest good; if there can be no good but in His favour, nor any evil but in departing from Him, then it is plain, that he who judges it the best thing he can do to please God to the utmost of his power, who worships and adores Him with all his heart and soul, who would rather have a pious mind than all the dignities and honours in the world, shows himself to be in the highest state of human wisdom.

This is a noble magnificence of thought, a true religious greatness of mind, to be thus affected with God's general providence, admiring and magnifying His wisdom in all things; never murmuring at the course of the world, or the state of things, but looking upon all around, at heaven and earth, as a pleased spectator, and adoring that invisible hand, which gives laws to all motions, and overrules all events to ends suitable to the highest wisdom and goodness.

For Love is the one only Blessing and Goodness, and God of Nature; and you have no true Religion, are no Worshiper of the one true God, but in and by that Spirit of Love, which is God himself living and working in you.

There can be no Goodness and Happiness for any intelligent Creature, but in and by this two-fold Life; and therefore the Union of the Divine and human Life, or the Son of God incarnate in Man, to make Man again a Partaker of the Divine Nature, is the one only possible Salvation for all the Sons of fallen Adam, that is, of Adam dead to, or fallen from his first Union with the Divine Life.

And therefore, that the holy Deity is all Love, and Blessing, and Goodness, willing and working only Love and Goodness to every Thing, as far as it can receive it, is a Truth as deeply grounded in me as the feeling of my own Existence.

For the Life of the Creature, whilst only creaturely, and possessing nothing but itself, is Hell; that is, it is all Pain and Want and Distress. Now nothing, in the Nature of the Thing, can make the least Alteration in this creaturely Life, nothing can help it to be in Light and Love, in Peace and Goodness, but the Union of God with it, and the Life of God working in it, because nothing but God is Light, and Love, and heavenly Goodness.