So many gods, so many creeds,
So many paths that wind and wind,
While just the art of being kind
Is all the sad world needs.

In the end only kindness matters

Amid all the bangs and the drama and the grand passions, it's kindness and just ordinary goodness that stands out in the end.

If you have kindness in your heart, you offer acts of kindness to touch the hearts of others wherever you go — whether they are random or planned. Kindness becomes a way of life.

After a heated dispute, we each undertook an assignment for the next class: to engage in one pleasurable activity and one philanthropic activity, and write about both. The results were life-changing. The afterglow of the “pleasurable” activity (hanging out with friends, or watching a movie, or eating a hot fudge sundae) paled in comparison with the effects of the kind action. When our philanthropic acts were spontaneous and called upon personal strengths, the whole day went better. One junior told about her nephew phoning for help with his third-grade arithmetic. After an hour of tutoring him, she was astonished to discover that “for the rest of the day, I could listen better, I was mellower, and people liked me much more than usual.” The exercise of kindness is a gratification, in contrast to a pleasure. As a gratification, it calls on your strengths to rise to an occasion and meet a challenge. Kindness is not accompanied by a separable stream of positive emotion like joy; rather, it consists in total engagement and in the loss of self-consciousness. Time stops.

Kindness is an inner desire that makes us want to do good things even if we do not get anything in return. It is the joy of our life to do them. When we do good things from this inner desire, there is kindness in everything we think, say, want, and do.

It is the history of our kindnesses that alone make this world tolerable. If it were not for that, for the effect of kind words, kind looks, kind letters . . . I should be inclined to think our life a practical jest in the worst possible spirit.

The fewer one's comforts, the fewer one's needs; and the fewer one's needs, the greater one's happiness.

Joy is the simplest form of gratitude.

make a kindness complete: thinking little of it, doing it promptly, and keeping it out of sight.

My religion is kindness.

How sweet all at once it was for me to be rid of those fruitless joys which I had once feared to lose..! You drove them from me, you who are the true, the sovereign joy. You drove them from me and took their place.... O Lord my God, my Light, my Wealth, and my Salvation.

Be kinder to yourself. And then let your kindness flood the world.

The truest greatness lies in being kind, the truest wisdom in a happy mind.