quotations about kindness
Kindness is an instinctive act, but that impulse must be nurtured, not merely by positive external feedback, but also by internal decision. Make kindness your guiding principle and you will not go wrong. Acknowledge to yourself each time you do something out of kindness and allow yourself to feel good about it so that, as you go forward, more and more of your acts will be acts rooted in kindness.
AYAMANATARA
365 Days to Enlightenment
Let us not fail to scatter along our pathway the seeds of kindness and sympathy. Some of them will doubtless perish; but if one only lives, it will perfume our steps and rejoice our eyes.
MADAME SWETCHINE
"Airelles", The Writings of Madame Swetchine
Unfading are the gardens of kindness.
GREEK PROVERB
Kindness can turn the bad man's heart, and fools convert to wise,
Make poison into nectar-juice, and friends of enemies.
BHARTRHARI
"The Praise of Works"
Kindness is more binding than a loan.
CHINESE PROVERB
The practice of kindness is the daily, friendly, homely caring form of love. It is both humble--a schoolboy bringing his teacher a bouquet of dandelions--and exalted--a fireman giving his life to save someone else's. Kindness is love with hands and hearts and minds. It is both whimsical--causing our faces to crack into a smile--and deeply touching--causing our eyes to shimmer with tears. And its miraculous nature is such that the more acts of kindness we offer, the more of them we have to give, for acts of kindness are always drawn from the endless well of love.
DAWNA MARKOVA
Random Acts of Kindness
That song is sweetest, bravest, best,
Which plucks the thistle-barb of care
From a despondent brother's breast,
And plants a sprig of heart's-ease there.
ANDREW DOWNING
"The Sweetest Song"
Kindness is, of the bounteous tree, which we all so oft do seek to become sustained by.
MARK ANTHONY
The Way Through
Kindness is the spirit in which we are to live. Our lives are never full and abundant until the spirit of kindness is our ordinary way of living.
SHELDON B. STEPHENSON
Meditations on the Holy Spirit of God
Kindness is no virtue, but a common duty.
FREDERICK GREENWOOD
The New Review, Jan. 1891
Kindness is the power that moves us to support and heal someone who offers nothing in return.
LEWIS B. SMEDES
Love Within Limits
A word of kindness is better than a fat pie.
RUSSIAN PROVERB
Kindness is a language the dumb can speak, and the deaf can hear and understand.
CHRISTIAN NESTELL BOVEE
attributed, Wisdom for the Soul
Life is made up, not of great sacrifices or duties, but of little things, in which smiles and kindnesses and small obligations, given habitually, are what win and preserve the heart, and secure comfort.
SIR HUMPHRY DAVY
attributed, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers
Kindness is the currency of our hearts, the only currency that can never be subtracted and never be balanced in anyone's ledgers. We choose to be kind because it is the way we want to live our lives, not because we will be rewarded in some way. When we start to keep score, we become closed-hearted: I'm not doing anything nice until someone does something good for me. Our acts of kindness are whole unto themselves. They require no acknowledgment and no reward, for the act itself returns us once again to the heart of our own humanity.
WILL GLENNON
Practice Random Acts of Kindness
By a simple wave of the wand of that miraculous fairy, kindness, there came instantly an end to the recollection of my past humiliations and a conception of all the duties laid upon me by the dignity that belongs to a human being, and at last vouchsafed to me.
OCTAVE MIRBEAU
The Diary of a Chambermaid
The milk of human kindness should be brought fresh to the table every morning.
AUSTIN O'MALLEY
Keystones of Thought
Kindness is the music of Good Will to men, and on this harp the smallest fingers may play heaven's sweetest tunes on earth.
ELIHU BURRITT
The Eastern Star, Jun. 1910
It is a shallow mind that suspects or rejects an offered kindness because it is unable to discover the motive. It would have been as wise for the Egyptians to have scorned the pure waters of the Nile because they were not quite certain about the source of that mighty river.
ARTHUR HELPS
Thoughts in the Cloister and the Crowd
Kindness is twice blessed. It blesses the one who gives it with a sense of his or her own capacity to love, and the person who receives it with a sense of the beneficence of the universe.
DAWNA MARKOVA
Random Acts of Kindness