Quotes about kindness

“I think,” said John, “you’d do well to remember what one of our philosophers wrote. All evil is a good become cancerous.

What was right? A man should live justly—but too often it was hard to say which was the road of justice. At any rate, this war was not a struggle of evil against good, black against white; it was a fight between many human beings, none of whom was wholly bad or wholly good.

Bitterness is repaid more often than kindness. One of his father’s sayings.

Benevolence is not a commodity that needs to be distributed sparingly like cake or chocolate. It is away of being, an attitude, an intention to do good for those who enter our sphere of attention and the wish to alleviate their suffering. Loving animals also does not mean loving humans less. In fact, by also loving animals we love people better, because our benevolence is then vaster and therefore of better quality. Someone who loves only a selection of sentient beings, even of humanity, is the possessor of only fragmentary and impoverished benevolence.

Kindness, altruistic love, and compassion are qualities that do not harmonize well with bias. Restricting the field of our compassion not only diminishes it quantitatively but also qualitatively. Applying our compassion only to certain beings, human beings in this case, makes it a lesser and a poorer thing.

Good can be done in a life in which Evil is the life principle, but only at the cost of the doer’s sacrificing his life.

Power isn't doing something terrible to someone who's weaker than you, … It's having the strength to do something terrible, and choosing not to.

An appeal to a goodness which is not in him is, to a vain and sensitive soul, a stinging insult.

Plenty of kind, decent, caring people have no religious beliefs, and they act out of the goodness of their hearts. Conversely, plenty of people who profess to be religious, even those who worship regularly, show no particular interest in the world beyond themselves.

“Dyrnwyn is yours,” Gwydion said, “as it was meant to be.”

“Yet Arawn is slain,” Taran replied. “Evil is conquered and the blade’s work done.”

“Evil conquered?” said Gwydion. “You have learned much, but learn this last and hardest of lessons. You have conquered only the enchantments of evil. That was the easiest of your tasks, only a beginning, not an ending. Do you believe evil itself so quickly overcome? Not so long as men still hate and slay each other, when greed and anger goad them. Against these even a flaming sword cannot prevail, but only that portion of good in all men’s hearts whose flame can never be quenched.

“It is easy to judge evil unmixed,” replied Gwydion. “But, alas, in most of us good and bad are closely woven as the threads on a loom; greater wisdom than mine is needed for the judging.”

I wondered again why the right thing always seemed to be met with so much resistance, when you'd think it would be the easier path. You had to fight to be virtuous...