Kindness Quotes

The Dalai Lama and Ali, the fourth caliph, are at the top, with Shakespeare, Alice Bailey and Amit Ray. The sourced lines are not especially sweet. Oscar Wilde, in The Soul of Man Under Socialism (1891), thought it immoral to use private property to relieve the evils that private property causes, and Disraeli, in Contarini Fleming (1832), says never to apologize for showing feeling, since you are apologizing for truth.

The passage that begins “I expect to pass through this world but once” is credited to Stephen Grellet and marked disputed. The notes show that it was first printed in a June 1869 magazine, writing of an unnamed Quaker. Two jokes are flagged as well: the best government being a benevolent tyranny tempered by assassination (Voltaire) and a kind word with a gun going farther than a kind word alone (Al Capone).