LOVING KINDNESS The first element of true love is loving kindness. The essence of loving kindness is being able to offer happiness. You can be the sunshine for another person. You can’t offer happiness until you have it for yourself. So build a home inside by accepting yourself and learning to love and heal yourself. Learn how to practice mindfulness in such a way that you can create moments of happiness and joy for your own nourishment. Then you have something to offer the other person.

Cultivating loving kindness for ourselves is the foundation of real love for our friends and family, for new people we encounter in our daily lives, for all beings and for life itself.

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.

A part of kindness consists in loving people more than they deserve.

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love. — LAO-TZU

When we feel love and kindness toward others, it not only makes others feel loved and cared for, but it helps us also to develop inner happiness and peace.

True kindness presupposes the faculty of imagining as one's own the suffering and joys of others.

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.

The lesson was clear: Don’t just show kindness in passing or to be courteous. Show it in depth, show it with passion, and expect nothing in return. Kindness is not just about being nice; it’s about recognizing another human being who deserves care and respect.

The undesirability of any system of rule not tempered with the quality of kindness is obvious; for "kindness" is a complex collection of various impulses, reactions and realisations highly necessary to the smooth adjustment of botched and freakish creatures like most human beings. It is a weakness basically—or, in some cases, and ostentation of secure superiority—but its net effect is desirable; hence it is, on the whole, praiseworthy. Since all motives at bottom are selfish and ignoble, we may judge acts and qualities only be their effects. Pessimism produces kindness. The disillusioned philosopher is even more tolerant than the priggish bourgeois idealist with his sentimental and extravagant notions of human dignity and destiny.

Of the sweets of adversity, and let me say that these are not numerous, I have found the sweetest, the most precious of all, is the lesson I learnt on the value of kindness. Every kindness I received, small or big, convinced me that there could never be enough of it in our world. To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people.

The wonder of spontaneous, tough-hearted, uncalculated, discipline, and unexpected love, that's living. True kindness never stops for one moment to calculate the cost of time, of money, of inconvenience, or even danger, but jumps to the aid of a neighbor, even an enemy. Love for neighbor is ever ready. And once we get it going, it keeps going and going and going.

Kindness in words creates confidence. Kindness in thinking creates profoundness. Kindness in giving creates love.

"To be kind is to respond with sensitivity and human warmth to the hopes and needs of others. Even the briefest touch of kindness can lighten a heavy heart. Kindness can change the lives of people"
~ Aung Sun Suu Kyi