Kindness quotes
Gentleness, charity and small acts that count. Quotes about kindness worth passing on, from proverbs and sermons to novelists who knew people well.
The library has 789 quotes on this topic. Here are 60 of the most quoted, no more than four from any one writer.
60 kindness quotes
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How far that little candle throws his beams! So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
William Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice, Act V Scene 1 -
Pity is the virtue of the law, And none but tyrants use it cruelly.
William Shakespeare Timon of Athens, Act iii. Sc. 5 -
Her voice was ever soft, Gentle, and low—an excellent thing in woman.
William Shakespeare King Lear, v. 3 -
What’s gone and what’s past help Should be past grief.
William Shakespeare The Winter’s Tale, Act iii. Sc.2 -
No one is useless in this world who lightens the burden of it for any one else.
Charles Dickens Our Mutual Friend -
What you do not want done to yourself, do not do to others.
Confucius Analects, XV.23 · translated by James Legge -
Is it not delightful to have friends coming from distant quarters?
Confucius Analects, I.1 · translated by James Legge -
Small service is true service while it lasts. Of humblest friends, bright creature! scorn not one: The daisy, by the shadow that it casts, Protects the lingering dewdrop from the sun.
William Wordsworth To a Child. Written in her Album -
We are not enemies, but friends. We must not be enemies.
Abraham Lincoln First Inaugural Address -
Do good by stealth, and blush to find it fame.
Alexander Pope Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace, Epilogue to the Satires. Dialogue -
The primal duties shine aloft, like stars; The charities that soothe and heal and bless Are scattered at the feet of man like flowers.
William Wordsworth The Excursion, Book ix -
The only reward of virtue is virtue; the only way to have a friend is to be one.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Friendship, Essays: First Series -
No longer talk at all about the kind of man that a good man ought to be, but be such.
Marcus Aurelius Meditations, Book X.16 · translated by George Long -
What do we live for, if it is not to make life less difficult to each other?
George Eliot Middlemarch -
Good nature and good sense must ever join; To err is human, to forgive divine.
Alexander Pope Essay on Criticism, Pt. I -
Teach me to feel another’s woe, To hide the fault I see; That mercy I to others show, That mercy show to me.
Alexander Pope The Universal Prayer, Stanza 10 -
Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It’s splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Anne of Green Gables -
’Tis hers to pluck the amaranthine flower Of faith, and round the sufferer’s temples bind Wreaths that endure affliction’s heaviest shower, And do not shrink from sorrow’s keenest wind.
William Wordsworth Weak is the Will of Man -
There is no beautifier of complexion or form or behavior like the wish to scatter joy, and not pain, around us.
Ralph Waldo Emerson The Conduct of Life -
You give but little when you give of your possessions. It is when you give of yourself that you truly give.
Kahlil Gibran The Prophet -
If I can stop one heart from breaking, I shall not live in vain; If I can ease one life the aching, Or cool one pain, Or help one fainting robin Unto his nest again, I shall not live in vain.
Emily Dickinson Poems, Second Series -
The drying up a single tear has more Of honest fame than shedding seas of gore.
Lord Byron Don Juan, Canto viii. Stanza 3 -
Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy.
Ralph Waldo Emerson Letters and Social Aims. Social Aims -
That best portion of a good man’s life,—His little, nameless, unremembered acts Of kindness and of love.
William Wordsworth Lines composed a few miles above Tintern Abbey -
In Faith and Hope the world will disagree, But all mankind’s concern is charity.
Alexander Pope Essays on Man, Epistle III -
Kind messages, that pass from land to land; Kind letters, that betray the heart’s deep history, In which we feel the pressure of a hand,—One touch of fire,—and all the rest is mystery!
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow The Seaside and the Fireside: Dedication -
And oft, though wisdom wake, suspicion sleeps At wisdom’s gate, and to simplicity Resigns her charge, while goodness thinks no ill Where no ill seems.
John Milton Paradise Lost, Book iii. Line 686 -
No one is so accursed by fate, No one so utterly desolate, But some heart, though unknown, Responds unto his own.
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow Endymion -
Forgiveness to the injured does belong; But they ne’er pardon who have done the wrong.
John Dryden The Conquest of Granada, Part ii. Act i. Sc. 2 -
Careless their merits or their faults to scan, His pity gave ere charity began.
Oliver Goldsmith The Deserted Village, Line 161 -
Better it would be to swallow a heated iron ball, like flaring fire, than that a bad unrestrained fellow should live on the charity of the land.
The Buddha Dhammapada, v. 308 · translated by F. Max Müller -
Among the attributes of God, although they are all equal, mercy shines with even more brilliancy than justice.
Miguel de Cervantes -
One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
When the conduct of men is designed to be influenced, persuasion—kind, unassuming persuasion—should ever be adopted.
Abraham Lincoln September 19 -
All sympathy is fine, but sympathy with suffering is the least fine mode.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
You find people ready enough to do the Samaritan, without the oil and twopence.
Sydney Smith Lady Holland’s Memoir. Vol. i. p. 261 -
Implore the compassion and forgiveness of the Almighty, that he may enlighten the nation to know and to do His will.
Abraham Lincoln October 27 -
After a good dinner one can forgive anybody, even one’s own relations.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely.
Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms -
Kindness is the golden chain by which society is bound together.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe -
Simple rules for saving money: To save half, when you are fired by an eager impulse to contribute to a charity, wait, and count forty. To save three-quarters, count sixty. To save it all, count sixty-five.
Mark Twain Following the Equator -
Then gently scan your brother man, Still gentler sister woman; Though they may gang a kennin’ wrang, To step aside is human.
Robert Burns Address to the Unco Guid -
He is the best gentleman that is the son of his own deserts, and not the degenerated heir of another’s virtue.
Victor Hugo -
We pity in others only those evils which we have ourselves experienced.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau -
She was not quite what you would call refined. She was not quite what you would call unrefined. She was the kind of person that keeps a parrot.
Mark Twain Following the Equator -
When the Great Tao Way or Method ceased to be observed, benevolence and righteousness came into vogue. Then appeared wisdom and shrewdness, and there ensued great hypocrisy.
Laozi Tao Te Ching, ch. 18.1 · translated by James Legge -
Those who minister to poverty and disease are accomplices in the two worst of all the crimes.
George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists -
The greatness of man even in his lust, to have known how to extract from it a wonderful code, and to have drawn from it a picture of benevolence.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 402 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
A man’s nature runs either to herbs or weeds: therefore let him seasonably water the one and destroy the other.
Francis Bacon Essays -
Every genuinely benevolent person loathes almsgiving and mendicity.
George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists -
Beware of the man who does not return your blow: he neither forgives you nor allows you to forgive yourself.
George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists -
Gentleness is sure to be victorious even in battle, and firmly to maintain its ground. Heaven will save its possessor, by his very gentleness protecting him.
Laozi Tao Te Ching, ch. 67.4 · translated by James Legge -
Education begins the gentleman, but reading, good company, and reflection must finish him.
John Locke -
Our humanity were a poor thing but for the divinity that stirs within us.
Francis Bacon -
To pity the unfortunate is not contrary to lust. On the contrary, we can quite well give such evidence of friendship, and acquire the reputation of kindly feeling, without giving anything.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 452 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
He who gives money he has not earned is generous with other people’s labor.
George Bernard Shaw Maxims for Revolutionists -
If lightning fell on low places, etc., poets, and those who can only reason about things of that kind, would lack proofs.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 39 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
Even God attributes to Himself avarice, jealousy, anger; and these are virtues as well as kindness, pity, constancy, which are also passions.
Blaise Pascal Pensées, No. 502 · translated by W. F. Trotter -
Favour and disgrace would seem equally to be feared; honour and great calamity, to be regarded as personal conditions of the same kind.
Laozi Tao Te Ching, ch. 13.1 · translated by James Legge -
Natural ability can almost compensate for the want of every kind of cultivation; but no cultivation of the mind can make up for the want of natural ability.
Arthur Schopenhauer