A kindness received should be returned with a freer hand.
Interpretation
When you receive kindness, you should reciprocate generously.
This quote by Saint Ambrose emphasizes the importance of reciprocity in relationships. It suggests that kindness is a gift that should be honored through an equally generous response, promoting a cycle of goodwill and benevolence among individuals.
In practice
In a speech about community service, you could say, 'As Saint Ambrose reminds us, a kindness received should be returned with a freer hand.'
A good youth ought to have a fear of God, to be subject to his parents, to give honor to his elders, to preserve his purity; he ought not to despise humility, but should love forbearance and modesty. All these are an ornament to youthful years.
Where a man's heart is, there is his treasure also.
The emperor is in the Church, not above the Church.
Take away the contests of the martyrs, and you have taken away their crowns.
It is ingrained in all living creatures, first of all, to preserve their own safety, to guard against what is harmful, to strive for what is advantageous.
The best way to use the gold of the Redeemer is for the redemption of those in peril.
Anyone who has lived through it, or those who are now living through it, knows that caring about an addict is as complex and fraught and debilitating as addiction itself.
Everybody who flashed the signs of loyalty he took to be loyal. Everybody who flashed the signs of intelligence he took to be intelligent. And so he had failed to see into his daughter, failed to see into his wife, failed to see into his one and only mistress—probably had never even begun to see into himself
Twenty years of romance makes a woman look like a ruin; but twenty years of marriage makes her something like a public building.
The world, in truth, is a wedding.
Let's just keep asking ourselves this question: 'Is what I'm about to do strengthening the web of connections, or is it weakening it?'
I see people, as they approach me, trying to make up their minds whether they'll 'say something about it' or not. I hate if they do, and if they don't.
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