Quotes About Kindness

The real test of character is how you treat someone who has no possibility of doing you any good.

He must have compassion upon those who are injured and smitten by misfortune and aid them within reasonable limits.

I thought not that you would. But it is there and simple too. Just this: If thou desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.

To me she is a goddess of love and dignity whose pleasure it is to aid those who are in need and to reward those who are deserving.

I thought not that you would. But it is there and simple too. Just this: If you desire to help thy friend, do so in a way that will not bring thy friend's burdens upon thyself.

He was generous in his charities. He was generous with his family.

Guard well within yourself that treasure - kindness. Know how to give without hesitation, how to lose without regret, how to acquire without meanness.

A hundred times in life, she declares, the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose; yet it maintains in one way and another the tradition of well wishing and well doing, without which all would perish.

Be a good and proactive and even somewhat desperate patient on your own behalf—seek out the most efficacious anti-selfishness medicines, energetically, for the rest of your life. Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

Find out what makes you kinder, what opens you up and brings out the most loving, generous, and unafraid version of you—and go after those things as if nothing else matters. Because, actually, nothing else does.

Which maybe that's what love was: liking someone how he was and doing things to help him get even better.

If you want your Storys to end happy, try being niser.

Or to look at it from the other end of the telescope: Who in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you, I bet. It's a little facile, maybe, and certainly hard to implement, but I'd say, as a goal in life, you could do worse than: Try to be kinder.

So here's something I know to be true, although it's a little corny, and I don't quite know what to do with it: What I regret most in my life are failures of kindness. Those moments when another human being was there, in front of me, suffering and I responded … sensibly. Reservedly. Mildly.

Then I'm a paunchy guy in a room, with a note pinned to his sleeve: You were alone in the world, it says, and did a kindness for someone in need. Good for you. Now post this module, and follow this map to the home of Mrs. Ken Schwartz. Care for her with some big money that will come in the mail. Find someone to love. Your heart has never been broken. You've never done anything unforgivable or hurt anyone beyond reparation. Everyone you've ever loved you've treated like gold.

I can look back and see that I've spent much of my life in a cloud of things that have tended to push being kind to the periphery. Things like: Anxiety. Fear. Insecurity. Ambition. The mistaken belief that enough accomplishment will rid me of all that anxiety, fear, insecurity, and ambition. The belief that if I can only accrue enough -- enough accomplishment, money, fame -- my neuroses will disappear.

If we're going to become kinder, that process has to include taking ourselves seriously—as doers, as accomplishers, as dreamers. We have to do that, to be our best selves.

He never appeared ugly to me, for his face, beaming with boundless kindness and benevolence towards mankind, had the stamp of intellectual beauty.

Kind little words, which are of the same blood as great and holy deeds," flowed from his lips constantly.

Then, the massive hands lifted the new people up to a pair of giant indescribable lips and whispered, in a fundamentally untranslatable Creator-language, something that meant, approximately: THIS TIME, BE KIND TO ONE ANOTHER. REMEMBER: EACH OF YOU WANTS TO BE HAPPY. AND I WANT YOU TO. EACH OF YOU WANTS TO LIVE FREE FROM FEAR. AND I WANT YOU TO. EACH OF YOU ARE SECRETLY AFRAID YOU ARE NOT GOOD ENOUGH. BUT YOU ARE, TRUST ME, YOU ARE.

But all that power has culminated in gentleness. It is as if that is the point of power: to allow one to access the higher registers of gentleness.

Who, in your life, do you remember most fondly, with the most undeniable feelings of warmth? Those who were kindest to you.

They didn't have to feel what you felt; they just had to be supported in feeling what they felt.

Saunders writes like something of a saint. He seems in touch with some better being. He teaches us not only how to write but how to live. He sets the bar and also the example. He hopes we might see the possibility of our better selves and act on it. He seems sent—what other way to put it?—to teach us mercy and grace.