The best kind of good works to make are those that react on you, making you, the maker, a better person. Miguel de Unamuno jotted this in his diary:
To do good is not the same thing as to be good. It is not enough to do good, one must be good. It is not enough to do more good works today than yesterday; it is necessary to be better today than yesterday. In fact, what kind of good works are those that have not made you better as you have gone on accumulating them and piling them up? Good works which don’t make you a better person as you treasure them up for yourself are vain, merely apparent, the good works of vanity. (Quoted from The Private World: Selections from the Diario Íntimo and Selected Letters 1890-1936, Series LXXXV 2, by Miguel de Unamuno. Bollingen, Princeton University Press. 1984. p. 43.)
For a brief biography of Miguel de Unamuno, click here.
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