Goodness is the moral quality of being virtuous, beneficial, and kind, among other qualities such as generosity. As per the Greeks, it is the uprightness element of the heart and life in general. We are always being advised to be good to others. Once you find a starving child, if you are capable, feed and take care of the child. That’s an act of kindness, which is an act of being good.
The element of goodness enables us to relate better, help one another, understand each other, and thus create a peaceful and happier community that is full of trust and reliance. God Himself advises us to be good to one another. He urges us to love our neighbor like we love ourselves and sets this as the core commandment to ensure that we live and relate well with others.
There is always a payback for being kind, which comes in a variety of unexpected ways. Life is unpredictable; therefore, you do not know what may happen tomorrow or the day after. Being good sets a foundation and sets a typical guarantee that in case you are in need, people might look at your good deeds in the past and come to your aid.
- “Human greatness does not lie in wealth or power, but in character and goodness. People are just people, and all people have faults and shortcomings, but all of us are born with a basic goodness.” – Anne Frank
- “The Crucifixion and other historical precedents notwithstanding, many of us still believe that outstanding goodness is a kind of armor, that virtue, seen plain and bare, gives pause to criminality. But perhaps it is the other way around.” – Mary McCarthy
- “People have goodness in their hearts.” – Sonny Bill Williams
- “…To be good, according to the vulgar standard of goodness, is obviously quite easy. It merely requires a certain amount of sordid terror, a certain lack of imaginative thought, and a certain low passion for middle-class respectability.” – Oscar Wilde
- “There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “Someone’s sitting in the shade today because someone planted a tree a long time ago.” – Warren Buffett
- “True religion is real living; living with all one’s soul, with all one’s goodness and righteousness.” – Albert Einstein
- “Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can.” – John Wesley
- “Wisdom has its root in goodness, not goodness its root in wisdom.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Good is a product of the ethical and spiritual artistry of individuals; it cannot be mass-produced.” – Aldous Huxley
- “Truth is handsomer than the affectation of love. Your goodness must have some edge to it, else it is none.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “The fragrance of flowers spreads only in the direction of the wind. But the goodness of a person spreads in all direction.” – Chanakya
- “To conceive the good, in fact, is not sufficient; it must be made to succeed among men. To accomplish this less pure paths must be followed.” – Ernest Renan
- “There is not enough love and goodness in the world to permit giving any of it away to imaginary beings.” – Friedrich Nietzsche
- “A fascinating theory is that each positive model has a negative, or shadow manifestation… We all want to be ‘good’ archetypes, but there’s a lot to be learned from our inner ‘bad boy’ or ‘bad girl’ if we can just find the courage to make his or her acquaintance.” – Eleanor Blair
- “A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.” – Percy Bysshe Shelley
- “Mere goodness can achieve little against the power of nature.” – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- “From the youngest of ages, we are oriented to prefer altruistic others and to engage in altruistic acts. Of course, we all engage in these behaviors, but sometimes they become obscured amidst all the other input we encounter on a nearly constant basis.” – Richard J. Davidson
- “Only happy people can learn. Only happy people can teach. Our religion should put a sparkle in our eyes and a tone in our voice, and a spring in our step that bears witness of our faith and confidence in the goodness of God.” – Anonomus
- “How can you go wrong with two people in love? If a good boy loves a good girl, good. If a good boy loves another good boy, good. And if a good girl loves the goodness in good boys and good girls, then all you have is more goodness, and goodness has nothing to do with sexual orientation.” – Fiona Apple
- “No one can give a definition of the soul. But we know what it feels like. The soul is the sense of something higher than ourselves, something that stirs in us thoughts, hopes, and aspirations which go out to the world of goodness, truth and beauty. The soul is a burning desire to breathe in this world of light and never to lose it–to remain children of light.” – Albert Schweitzer
- “It is a grand mistake to think of being great without goodness and I pronounce it as certain that there was never a truly great man that was not at the same time truly virtuous.” – Benjamin Franklin
- “Live not as though there were a thousand years ahead of you. Fate is at your elbow; make yourself good while life and power are still yours.” – Marcus Aurelius
- “If you pretend to be good, the world takes you very seriously. If you pretend to be bad, it doesn’t. Such is the astounding stupidity of optimism.” – Oscar Wilde
- “Nothing that was worthy in the past departs; no truth or goodness realized by man ever dies, or can die.” – Thomas Carlyle
- “As if one could know the good a person is capable of, when one doesn’t know the bad he might do.” – Elias Canetti
- “When a person tells others ‘Be good,’ he conveys to his hearers the feeling that he is good and they are not.” – Meher Baba
- “Goodness is the only investment that never fails.” – Henry David Thoreau
- “It is very hard to be simple enough to be good.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson
- “Being part of the natural world reminds me that innocence isn’t ever lost completely; we just need to maintain our goodness to regain it.” – Jewel
- “Giving thanks is that: making the canyon of pain into a megaphone to proclaim the ultimate goodness of God when Satan and all the world would sneer at us to recant.” – Ann Voskamp
- “A good heart will help you to a bonny face, my lad and a bad one will turn the bonniest into something worse than ugly.” – Emily Brontë
- “A phrase is born into the world both good and bad at the same time. The secret lies in a slight, an almost invisible twist. The lever should rest in your hand, getting warm and you can only turn it once, not twice.” – Isaac Babel
- “Virtue is bold, and goodness never fearful.” – William Shakespeare
- “The good is, like nature, an immense landscape in which man advances through centuries of exploration.” – José Ortega y Gasset
- “It is by the goodness of God that in our country we have those three unspeakably precious things: freedom of speech, freedom of conscience, and the prudence never to practice either of them.” – Mark Twain
- “Our will is always for our own good, but we do not always see what that is.” – Jean-Jacques Rousseau
- “What a strange illusion it is to suppose that beauty is goodness.” – Leo Tolstoy
- “Be a true representative of the goodness in your heart, and don’t expect it to be easy or even noticed.” – Adyashanti
- “How did it get so late so soon? Its night before its afternoon. December is here before its June. My goodness how the time has flewn. How did it get so late so soon?” – Seuss
- “Do your little bit of good where you are; its those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world.” – Desmond Tutu
- “If you are to be kept right, you must possess either good friends or red-hot enemies. The one will warn you, the other will expose you.” – Diogenes
- “Man is born for deeds of kindness.” – Marcus Aurelius
- “Too often we underestimate the power of a touch, a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, an honest compliment, or the smallest act of caring, all of which have the potential to turn a life around.” – Leo Buscaglia
- “Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.” – Charles Baudelaire
- “In the world of knowledge, the essential Form of Good is the limit of our inquiries, and can barely be perceived; but, when perceived, we cannot help concluding that it is in every case the source of all that is bright and beautiful –in the visible world giving birth to light and its master, and in the intellectual world dispensing, immediately and with full authority, truth and reason –and that whosoever would act wisely, either in private or in public, must set this Form of Good before his eyes.” – Plato
- “Our goodness comes solely from thinking on goodness; our wickedness from thinking on wickedness. We, too, are the victims of our own contemplation.” – John Jay Chapman
- “How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good dead in a naughty world.” – William Shakespeare
- “Have regard for your name, since it will remain for you longer than a great store of gold.” – Ecclesiasticus
- “Let God backup the files of your life If the world corrupt your goodness, God will restore them” ― Ojingiri Hannah
