How Beautiful a Day Can Be When Kindness Touches It

I came home tonight to find someone had put my garbage and recycling out for me. You guys, I cried. I cannot express to you the love I feel when I see random acts of kindness. When I am the recipient, it has a way of making me love everyone around me more (someone did it, and I have no idea who. So I can love everyone more, just to make sure that one person is covered =o) ).

A few years ago I kept a journal of acts of kindness I saw each day--ones I witnessed, ones that someone did for me, or the ones I secretly did for others but wanted to share somewhere. Something about these little things gives me greater hope for humanity. I want to believe in people, and sometimes in this world it can be hard. But things like this...this is what love IS, isn't it? Isn't this what God is talking about when he says love your neighbors as yourselves (the second great commandment)? To think of others when you're doing your daily, little trivial things, like taking out your garbage?

* "No act of kindness, however small, is ever wasted." ~Aesop
* "Act on all impressions to do good." ~Camilla Kimball, my heroine
* "Life is not so short but that there is always time enough for courtesy." ~Ralph Waldo Emerson
* "Kindness gives birth to kindness." ~Sophocles
* "Help your brother's boat across and your own will reach the shore." ~Hindu proverb
* "Do good, and care not to whom." ~Italian poverb
* "Always be kind, for everyone is fighting a hard battle." ~Plato
* "Do your little bit of good where you are; it's those little bits of good put together that overwhelm the world." ~Archbishop Desmond Tutu
* "At the end of the day, the only thing that matters is how kind you are to other people. Everything else is secondary." ~Anna McBee
* "What you leave behind is not what is engraved in stone monuments, but what is woven in the lives of others." ~Perciles
* "The ideas that have lighted my way have been kindness, beauty, and truth." ~Albert Einstein
* "How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single minute before starting to improve the world." ~Anne Frank
* "Forget injuries. Never forget kindnesses." ~Confucius
* "To be able to practice five things everywhere under heaven constitutes perfect virtue...gravity, generosity of soul, sincerity, earnestness, and kindness." ~Confucius
* "If you want others to be happy, practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion." ~Dalai Lama of Tibet
* "The smallest good deed is better than the grandest good intention." ~Duguet
* "Goodness is the only investment which never fails." ~Henry David Thoreau
* "Three things in human life are important. The first is to be kind. The second is to be kind. And the third is to be kind." ~Henry James
* "The best portion of a good man's life: his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love." ~William Wordsworth Longfellow
* "Today, make an investment in someone else's happiness." ~Unknown
* "What wisdom can you find that is greater than kindness?" ~Jean Jacques Rousseau
* "Whenever you are confronted with an opponent, conquer him with love." ~Mahatma Gandhi
* "How far that little candle throws its beams! So shines a good deed in a weary world." ~William Shakespeare
* "Let no one ever come to you without leaving better and happier. Be the living expression of God's kindness: kindness in your face, kindness in your eyes, kindness in your smile." ~Mother Teresa, my heroine
* "You must be the change you wish to see in the world." ~Mahatma Gandhi