A Quote by Geoffrey Chaucer

Mercy surpasses justice.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Quote Topics

Justice Mercy

Quote Author

Geoffrey Chaucer
English - Poet
1343 - October 25, 1400

The law is meant to work for justice. But people who know themselves know that, at some point, justice had better be mitigated by mercy. And you don't get to mercy by a legal principle. You get to mercy by way of imagination, sympathy, tenderness of heart - which are not weaknesses.

Wendell Berry

The living God is a God of justice and mercy and He will be satisfied with nothing less than a people in whom his justice and mercy are alive.

Lesslie Newbigin

Though justice be Thy plea, consider this: That in the course of justice none of us should see salvation. We do pray for mercy, And that same prayer doth teach us all to render The deeds of mercy.

George Bernard Shaw

Noah is the battle of justice versus mercy. In Genesis it says that Noah was righteous in his times. You think you sort of know what righteous means, you know, if you listen to a lot of Bob Marley. According to all the biblical scholars we talked to, righteousness is the proper balance of justice and mercy. If you think of that, as a parent, you know that if you have too much justice and you're too strict, you destroy a child. If you have too much mercy, as a parent, you destroy a child as well. A big part of this movie is Noah finding mercy for man.

Darren Aronofsky

The essence of justice is mercy. Making a child suffer for wrong-doing is merciful to the child. There is no mercy in letting the child have its own will, plunging headlong to destruction with the bits in its mouth. There is no mercy to society nor to the criminal if the wrong is not repressed and the right vindicated. We injure the culprit who comes up to take his proper doom at the bar of justice, if we do not make him feel that he has done a wrong thing. We may deliver his body from the prison, but not at the expense of justice nor to his own injury.

Edwin Hubbel Chapin

Mercy without justice is the mother of dissolution; justice without mercy is cruelty.

Thomas Aquinas

God in his infinite mercy has devised a way by which justice can be satisfied, and yet mercy can be triumphant. Jesus Christ, the only begotten of the Father, took upon himself the form of man, and offered unto Divine Justice that which was accepted as an equivalent for the punishment due to all his people.

Charles Spurgeon

His justice is the love that gives to each one of His creatures the gifts that His mercy has previously decreed. And His mercy is His love, doing justice to its own exigencies, and renewing the gift which we had failed to accept.

Thomas Merton

By definition, the big difference between mercy and justice is that mercy is never ever obligatory.

R. C. Sproul

The Christian gospel is a summons to peace, calling for justice beyond anger, mercy beyond justice, forgiveness beyond mercy, love beyond forgiveness.

Wendell Berry

The idea that the Christian god is just, is directly contradicted by the idea that the Christian god is merciful. Perfect justice and any mercy are necessarily directly in contradiction, because mercy is a suspension of justice.

Matt Dillahunty

I do believe, with all my heart and mind and spirit, that I, not as President but as a humble servant of God, will receive justice without mercy if I fail to show mercy.

Gerald R. Ford

Mercy is like the rainbow, which God hath set in the clouds; it never shines after it is night. If we refuse mercy here, we shall have justice in eternity.

Jeremy Taylor

The moment we think we deserve mercy a little alarm bell should go off in our head because we are not talking about mercy anymore but justice.

R. C. Sproul

It is the madness of folly, to expect mercy from those who have refused to do justice; and even mercy, where conquest is the object, is only a trick of war; the cunning of the fox is as murderous as the violence of the wolf.