A Quote by Joseph Addison

Dependence is a perpetual call upon humanity, and a greater incitement to tenderness and pity than any other motive whatever.

Joseph Addison

Quote Topics

Any Call Dependence Greater Humanity Incitement Motive Other Perpetual Pity Tenderness Than Whatever

Quote Author

Joseph Addison
English - Writer
May 1, 1672 - June 17, 1719

Seen in retrospect, evolution as a whole doubtless had a general direction, from simple to complex, from dependence on to relative independence of the environment, to greater and greater autonomy of individuals, greater and greater development of sense organs and nervous systems conveying and processing information about the state of the organism's surroundings, and finally greater and greater consciousness. You can call this direction progress or by some other name.

Theodosius Dobzhansky

I firmly believe that the army of persons who urge greater and greater centralization of authority and greater and greater dependence upon the Federal Treasury are really more dangerous to our form of government than any external threat that can possibly be arrayed against us.

Dwight D. Eisenhower

If the Lord is coming soon, is this not a very practical motive for greater missionary effort? I know of no other motive that has been so stimulating to myself.

Hudson Taylor

Age, per se, may claim tenderness and pity, but not respect; that only comes when the years have brought humanity and wisdom and the experience that worketh hope.

Margaret Deland

To see helpless infancy stretching out her hands, and pouring out her cries in testimony of dependence, without any powers to alarm jealousy, or any guilt to alienate affection, must surely awaken tenderness in every human mind; and tenderness once excited will be hourly increased by the natural contagion of felicity, by the repercussion of communicated pleasure, by the consciousness of dignity of benefaction.

Samuel Johnson

Both humanity's capacity to innovate and the incentives to innovate are greater today than at any other time in history.

Ben Bernanke

Whatever impatience we may feel towards our neighbor, and whatever indignation our race may rouse in us, we are chained one to another, and, companions in labour and misfortune, have everything to lose by mutual recrimination and reproach. Let us be silent as to each other's weakness, helpful, tolerant, many, tender towards each other! Or, if we cannot feel tenderness, may we at least feel pity!

Henri Frederic Amiel

Why continue? Because we must. Because we have the call. Because it is nobler to fight for rationality without winning than to give up in the face of continued defeats. Because whatever true progress humanity makes is through the rationality of the occasional individual and because any one individual we may win for the cause may do more for humanity than a hundred thousand who hug their superstitions to their breast.

Isaac Asimov

Between richer and poorer classes in a free country a mutually respecting antagonism is much healthier than pity on the one hand and dependence on the other, as is, perhaps, the next best thing to fraternal feeling.

Charles Horton Cooley

Watch your motive before God; have no other motive in prayer than to know Him.

Oswald Chambers

In his essay, ‘Perpetual Peace,’ the philosopher, Immanuel Kant, argued that perpetual peace would eventually come to the world in one of two ways, by human insight or by conflicts and catastrophes of a magnitude that left humanity no other choice. We are at such a juncture.

Henry A. Kissinger

Posterity will call you the great emancipator, a more enviable title than any crown could be, and greater than any merely mundane treasure.

Giuseppe Garibaldi

How I regret now that my perpetual emotional dependence on the man I love has killed all my other talents - my energy too: and I had such a lot of that once.

Sophia Tolstaya

You will surely smile with me when I say, 'Thank God one can still recognise self-pity as such and not give it any greater dignity than just that.

James Fox

Every one knows that the heavenly bodies move in certain paths in relation to each other with seeming consistency and regularity which we call [physical] law. ... No one attributes freewill or motive to the material world. Is the conduct of man or the other animals any more subject to whim or choice than the action of the planets? ... We know that man's every act is induced by motives that led or urged him here or there; that the sequence of cause and effect runs through the whole universe, and is nowhere more compelling than with man.