Quotes About Kindness

because we are all, in the private kingdom of our hearts, desperate for the company of a wise, true friend. Someone who isn't embarrassed by our emotions, or her own, who recognizes that life is short and that all we have to offer, in the end, is love.

Most of the people I met on the PCT passed only briefly through my life, but I was enriched by each of them. They made me laugh they made me think, they made me go on another day, and most of all, they made me trust entirely in the kindness of strangers.

we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be selfish assholes first.

Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

She was kindhearted and forgiving, generous and naïve.

As she dressed to go, she found that she couldn't put on her own socks and she called me into her room and asked me to help. She sat on the bed and I got down on my knees before her. I had never put socks on another person, and it was harder than I thought it would be.

You must love in order to be loved. You must be inclusive in order to feel yourself among the included. You must give in order to receive.

He was a nice guy, I decided, when I glanced at the bumper of his car. On it, there was a green sticker that said IMAGINE WHIRLED PEAS. Has there ever been a serial killer who imagined whirled peas?

Inhabit the beauty that lives in your beastly body and strive to see the beauty in all the other beasts.

You have to pay your own electric bill. You have to be kind. You have to give it all you got. You have to find people who love you truly and love them back with the same truth. But that's all.

I think we underestimate the universe's desire to be kind to us.

I'm going to address you bluntly, but it's a directness that rises from my compassion for you, not my judgment of you.

when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

But compassion isn't about solutions. It's about giving all the love that you've got.

The kindest and most meaningful thing anyone ever says to me is: Your mother would be proud of you.

Anything else? To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

Divorcing him is the most excruciating decision I've ever made. But it was the wisest one too. And I wasn't the only one whose life is better for it. He deserved the love of a woman who didn't have the word go whispering like a deranged ghost in her ear. To leave him was a kindness of a sort, though it didn't seem that way at the time.

Why? Because in your twenties you're becoming who you're going to be and so you might as well not be an asshole.

Also, because it's harder to be magnanimous when you're in your twenties, I think, and so that's why I'd like to remind you of it.

To be about ten times more magnanimous than you believe yourself capable of being. Your life will be a hundred times better for it. This is good advice for anyone at any age, but particularly for those in their twenties.

I learned then what I have learned in many other ways over the course of my life: that when we're in the presence of someone else's pain, the burden of not-doing is so much greater than the burden of doing. Doing lifts the burden. Even if it's a small thing. Like writing a letter.

our minds are small, but our hearts are big. Just about every one of us has fucked up at some point or another

How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.

Not how the kittens suffered during those weeks they were wandering inside the dark building with no way out—though surely there's something there too—but how they saved themselves. How frightened those kittens were, and yet how they persisted. How when two strangers offered up their palms, they stepped in.