“I want to be magic. I want to touch the heart of the world and make it smile. I want to be a friend of elves and live in a tree. Or under a hill. I want to marry a moonbeam and hear the stars sing. I don’t want to pretend at magic anymore. I want to be magic.”— Charles de Lint, goodreads.com
“Not everyone will like you. Not everyone will be kind to you. Not everyone will agree with you. That does not mean you have to be unkind in return.”— Brianna Wiest, thoughtcatalog.com
“Try to say nothing negative about anybody for three days, for forty-five days, for three months. See what happens to your life.”— Yoko Ono, twitter.com
“Good people are like candles; they burn themselves up to give others light.”— Turkish Proverb, amazon.com
“I sympathise with everybody, damn it, and see why they are the way they are.”— Kurt Vonnegut, amazon.com
“She is kind and very beautiful. But she can be so cruel and it comes so suddenly and such birds that fly, dipping and hunting, with their small sad voices are made too delicately for the sea.”— Ernest Hemingway, amazon.com
“What I’ve come to learn is that the world is never saved in grand messianic gestures, but in the simple accumulation of gentle, soft, almost invisible acts of compassion.”— Chris Abani, ted.com
“Empathy is a special way of coming to know another and ourself, a kind of attuning and understanding. When empathy is extended, it satisfies our needs and wish for intimacy, it rescues us from our feelings of aloneness.”— Carl Rogers, stepbystepcounselling.co.uk
“If you’re not tough it’s hard to survive in this world; and if you’re not kind then you don’t deserve to survive.”— Raymond Chandler, quotemadness.com
“All I know is this: nobody’s very big in the first place, and it looks to me like everybody spends their whole life tearing everybody else down.”— Ken Kesey, amazon.com
“Not that I want to be a god or a hero. Just to change into a tree, grow for ages, not hurt anyone.”— Czeslaw Milosz, washingtonpost.com
“Compassion for animals is intimately connected with goodness of character; and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man or woman.”— Arthur Schopenhauer, amazon.com
“Whoever gives nothing has nothing. The greatest misfortune is not to be unloved, but not to love.”— Albert Camus, amazon.com
“The lonely one offers his hand too quickly to whomever he encounters.”— Friedrich Nietzsche, amazon.com
“This is my simple religion. There is no need for temples; no need for complicated philosophy. Our own brain, our own heart is our temple; the philosophy is kindness.”— Dalai Lama, amazon.com