Service Quotes

"Memorial Day isn't just about honoring veterans, its honoring those who lost their lives. Veterans had the fortune of coming home. For us, that's a reminder of when we come home we still have a responsibility to serve. It's a continuation of service that honors our country and those who fell defending it."

- Pete Hegseth

"Better than honor and glory, and history’s iron pen, was the thought of duty done and the love of his fellow-men."

- Richard Watson Gilder

"I want people to take the initiative to find veterans that need help, veterans that are suffering and in need of assistance reintegrating from combat back into society, into normal family lives and jobs. We need to take a real 'boots on the ground' approach to helping veterans in need."

- Max Martini

"I cannot do all the good that the world needs. But the world needs all the good that I can do."

- Jana Stanfield

"If you're watching to learn.... Watch! If you're watching for a break.... Speak up! If you're watching for me to stop.... Leave! If you're here to help.... Grab a shovel!"

- Original Composition

"Service doesn’t have to be big and grandiose to be meaningful and make a difference."

- Cheryl Esplin

"There is incredible value in being of service to others."

- Elizabeth Berg

"To give real service, you must add something which cannot be bought or measured with money."

- Douglas Adams

"Life is a place of service and in that service one has to suffer a great deal that is hard to bear, but more often to experience a great deal of joy. But that joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness."

- Lev Tolstoy

"Whatever you have received more than others--in health, in talents, in ability, in success, in a pleasant childhood, in harmonious conditions of home life--all this you must not take to yourself as a matter of course. In gratitude for your good fortune, you must remember in return some sacrifice of your own life for another life."

- Albert Schweitzer

"Service rendered as a gift or love-offering to Life: work that is engaged in, not for self or for profit, but as an act of love and service, these bring the doer a harvest of blessings. . . . When we serve and when we give, we open ourselves to receive life's richest blessings, its greatest prizes, and its most enduring lessons."

- Henry T. Hamblin

"There are those who in the name of God teach that you must deny yourself and seek only to serve others. God's plan is more beautiful than that. You were created to express the will of God. This means that your highest dreams and aspirations are of God. By seeking these through the ways of the Lord you automatically do that which is best for all others."

- Bruce Gilbert

"As far as service goes, it can take the form of a million things. To do service, you don’t have to be a doctor working in the slums for free, or become a social worker. Your position in life and what you do doesn’t matter as much as how you do what you do."

- Elisabeth Kubler-Ross

"Service is what life is all about."

- Marian Wright Edelman

"Great acts are made up of small deeds."

- Lao Tzu

"Our lives no longer belong to us alone; they belong to all who need us desperately."

- Elie Wiesel

"What is the essence of life? To serve others and to do good."

- Aristotle

"If our hopes of building a better and safer world are to become more than wishful thinking, we will need the engagement of volunteers more than ever."

- Kofi Annan

"The purpose of life is not to be happy, but to matter– to be productive, to be useful, to have it make some difference that you have lived at all."

- Leo Rosten

"It’s easy to make a buck. It’s a lot tougher to make a difference."

- Tom Brokaw

"The broadest, and maybe the most meaningful definition of volunteering: Doing more than you have to because you want to, in a cause you consider good."

- Ivan Scheier

"I am a little pencil in the hand of a writing God who is sending a love letter to the world."

- Mother Teresa

"Even if it’s a little thing, do something for those who have need of a man’s help– something for which you get no pay but the privilege of doing it. For, remember, you don’t live in a world all your own. Your brothers are here, too."

- Albert Schweitzer

"Service is the rent we pay for our place on earth."

- Shirley Chisholm

"Great opportunities to help others seldom come, but small ones surround us daily."

- Sally Koch

"At the heart of silence is prayer. At the heart of prayer is faith. At the heart of faith is life. At the heart of life is service."

- Mother Teresa

"If you want to touch the past, touch a rock. If you want to touch the present, touch a flower. If you want to touch the future, touch a life."

"Volunteers are love in motion!"

"Being good is commendable, but only when it is combined with doing good is it useful."

"Volunteering is the ultimate exercise in democracy. You vote in elections once a year, but when you volunteer, you vote every day about the kind of community you want to live in."