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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).

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All crush'd and stone-cast in behaviour,
She stood as a marble would stand,
Then the Saviour bent down, and the Saviour
In silence wrote on in the sand.

Joaquin Miller

It is a little embarrassing that after forty-five years of research and study, the best advice I can give people is to be a little kinder to each other

Aldous Huxley This Timeless Moment: A Personal View of Aldous Huxley (1968)

If thou neglectest thy love to thy neighbor, in vain thou professest thy love to God; for by thy love to God, the love to thy neighbor is begotten, and by the love to thy neighbor, thy love to God is nourished.

Francis Quarles

If to be venerated for benevolence, if to be admired for talents, if to be esteemed for patriotism, if to be loved for philanthropy, can gratify the human mind, you must have the pleasing consolation to know that you have not lived in vain.

George Washington

Proportion thy charity to the strength of thy estate, lest God proportion thy estate to the weakness of thy charity. Let the lips of the poor be the trumpet of thy gift, lest in seeking applause thou lose thy reward. Nothing is more pleasing to God than an open hand and a close mouth.

Francis Quarles

In charity there is no excess.

Francis Bacon

In silence, * * *
Steals on soft-handed Charity,
Tempering her gifts, that seem so free,
By time and place,
Till not a woe the bleak world see,
But finds her grace.

John Keble

Though he was rough, he was kindly.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Courtship of Miles Standish (1858)

Give alms from your possessions, and do not let your eye begrudge the gift when you make it. Do not turn your face away from anyone who is poor, and the face of God will not be turned away from you.

Tobit

Benevolence is often very peremptory.

W. Somerset Maugham

Charity is a calm, severe duty; it must be intellectual, to be advantageous. It is a strange mistake that it should ever be considered a merit; its fulfilment is only what we owe to each other, and is a debt never paid to its full extent.

Letitia Elizabeth Landon

Those who live by mystery & charlatanerie, fearing you would render them useless by simplifying the Christian philosophy — the most sublime and benevolent, but most perverted system that ever shone on man — endeavored to crush your well-earned & well-deserved fame.

Thomas Jefferson

The mass of men need arousing to see that good comes to all men alike and not just to a few privileged groups, and to learn also that "hatred ceases not by hatred but that hatred ceases by love". This love is not a sentiment, but practical goodwill, expressing itself through individuals, in communities and among nations.

Alice Bailey

Charlie and I never will operate Berkshire in a manner that depends on the kindness of strangers – or even that of friends who may be facing liquidity problems of their own.

Warren Buffett

So give to the poor; I’m begging you, I’m warning you, I’m commanding you, I’m ordering you.

Augustine of Hippo

It is the business of the benevolent man to seek to promote what is beneficial to the world and to eliminate what is harmful, and to provide a model for the world. What benefits he will carry out; what does not benefit men he will leave alone.

Mozi

For true evangelical faith...cannot lay dormant; but manifests itself in all righteousness and works of love; it...clothes the naked; feeds the hungry; consoles the afflicted; shelters the miserable; aids and consoles all the oppressed; returns good for evil; serves those that injure it; prays for those that persecute it.

Menno Simons

I don't believe in charity. I believe in solidarity. Charity is so vertical. It goes from the top to the bottom. Solidarity is horizontal. It respects the other person. I have a lot to learn from other people.

Eduardo Galeano in: David Barsamian (2004)

Charity is that rational and constant affection, which makes us sacrifice ourselves to the human race, as if we were united with it, so as to form one individual, partaking equally in its adversity and prosperity.

Confucius

It is above all the impersonal and economically rationalized (but for this very reason ethically irrational) character of purely commercial relationships that evokes the suspicion, never clearly expressed but all the more strongly felt, of ethical religions. For every purely personal relationship of man to man, of whatever sort and even including complete enslavement, may be subjected to ethical requirements and ethically regulated. This is true because the structures of these relationships depend upon the individual wills of the participants, leaving room in such relations for manifestations of the virtue of charity. But this is not the situation in the realm of economically rationalised relationships, where personal control is exercised in inverse ratio to the degree of rational differentiation of the economic structure.

Max Weber Sociology of Religion (1922)

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