73 Inspiring Quotes On Goodness

In a world where we often find ourselves navigating through challenges and uncertainties, the value of goodness remains a beacon of hope and positivity. Goodness, in its many forms, has the power to uplift spirits, transform lives, and foster connections that transcend differences. Embracing the essence of goodness not only enriches our own lives but also impacts those around us in profound ways. In this curated collection of 73 inspiring quotes on goodness, you’ll find words of wisdom and encouragement from thought leaders, philosophers, and visionaries. These quotes serve as gentle reminders of the impact kindness and compassion can have, illuminating paths we may have forgotten. As you delve into this compilation, allow these reflections to inspire you to live with an open heart, nurturing the seeds of goodness within yourself and in the world.

1. “When I despair, I remember that all through history the way of truth and love have always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and for a time, they can seem invincible, but in the end, they always fall. Think of it--always.” - Mahatma Gandhi

2. “A good head and good heart are always a formidable combination. But when you add to that a literate tongue or pen, then you have something very special.” - Nelson Mandela

3. “He's not safe, but he's good (referring to Aslan, the Lion, in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)” - C. S. Lewis

4. “This life therefore is not righteousness, but growth in righteousness, not health, but healing, not being but becoming, not rest but exercise. We are not yet what we shall be, but we are growing toward it, the process is not yet finished, but it is going on, this is not the end, but it is the road. All does not yet gleam in glory, but all is being purified.” - Martin Luther

5. “It's the action, not the fruit of the action, that's important. You have to do the right thing. It may not be in your power, may not be in your time, that there'll be any fruit. But that doesn't mean you stop doing the right thing. You may never know what results come from your action. But if you do nothing, there will be no result.” - Mahatma Gandhi

6. “The proper function of a government is to make it easy for the people to do good, and difficult for them to do evil. ” - Daniel Webster

7. “There is no greatness where there is not simplicity, goodness, and truth.” - Leo Tolstoy

8. “If it is not right do not do it; if it is not true do not say it.” - Marcus Aurelius

9. “Moreover, if great men are the only hope of the Evolutionary Process, they are morally bound to rule over the masses for their own good -- we are all here on earth to help others: what on earth the others are here for, I don't know -- and the masses have no right whatsoever to resist them.” - W.H. Auden

10. “What a lovely thing a rose is!"He walked past the couch to the open window and held up the drooping stalk of a moss-rose, looking down at the dainty blend of crimson and green. It was a new phase of his character to me, for I had never before seen him show any keen interest in natural objects. "There is nothing in which deduction is so necessary as religion," said he, leaning with his back against the shutters. "It can be built up as an exact science by the reasoner. Our highest assurance of the goodness of Providence seems to me to rest in the flowers. All other things, our powers, our desires, our food, are all really necessary for our existence in the first instance. But this rose is an extra. Its smell and its color are an embellishment of life, not a condition of it. It is only goodness which gives extras, and so I say again that we have much to hope from the flowers.” - Arthur Conan Doyle

11. “Do not act as if you were going to live ten thousand years. Death hangs over you. While you live, while it is in your power, be good.” - Marcus Aurelius

12. “Oh cold, cold, rigid, dreadful Death, set up thine altar here, and dress it with such terrors as thou hast at thy command: for this is thy dominion! But of the loved, revered, and honoured head, thou canst not turn one hair to thy dread purposes, or make one feature odious. It is not that the hand is heavy and will fall down when released; it is not that the heart and pulse are still; but that the hand was open, generous, and true; the heart brave, warm, and tender; and the pulse a man's. Strike, Shadow, strike! And see his good deeds springing from the wound, to sow the world with life immortal.” - Dickens, Charles

13. “Be good and you will be lonesome.” - Mark Twain

14. “I think the biggest lie the devil ever told was that beauty and goodness are the same.” - Daniel Nayeri

15. “Robert G. Ingersoll was a great man. a wonderful intellect, a great soul of matchless courage, one of the great men of the earth -- and yet we have no right to bow down to his memory simply because he was great. Great orators, great soldiers, great lawyers, often use their gifts for a most unholy cause. We meet to pay a tribute of love and respect to Robert G. Ingersoll because he used his matchless power for the good of man.{Darrow's eulogy for Ingersoll at his funeral}” - Clarence Darrow

16. “i can't prove this but i can't prove you're a good person though i suspect you're a good person.” - Bob Hicok

17. “Knowing the Techniques of Survival........Our fears and anxieties will often drive us to build impenetrable walls that act like blinders deflecting others and preventing us from seeing who surrounds us. Getting focused to the things that matter are the Key to what has to be to COMPLETE our MISSION. "I Had Every Excuse to Fail but I Chose None" Speak Life!!!(sky)” - Sebastian K. Young

18. “If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.” - William Shakespeare

19. “Goodness, real goodness, has it's own sort of cruelty to it.” - Cassandra Clare

20. “Everybody's got the seam of goodness in them, Kit," said Grandpa. "Just a matter of whether it can be found and brought out into the light.” - David Almond

21. “A man does not have to be an angel to be a saint.” - Albert Schweitzer

22. “Goodness was not a trait you acquired; it was a value you practiced when you were on the verge of doing evil.” - Julius Lester

23. “Evil is committed without effort, naturally, fatally; goodness is always the product of some art.” - Charles Baudelaire

24. “Where everything is bad it must be good to know the worst.” - Francis H. Bradley

25. “Every man had his personal habits, passions, and impulses toward goodness, beauty, and truth.” - Leo Tolstoy

26. “You are protected, in short, by your ability to love!” - J.K. Rowling

27. “On the whole, men are more good than bad; that, however, isn't the real point. But they are more or less ignorant, and it is this that we call vice or virtue; the most incorrigible vice being that of an ignorance that fancies it knows everything and therefore claims for itself the right to kill. The soul of the murderer is blind; and there can be no true goodness nor true love without the utmost clear-sightedness.” - Albert Camus

28. “Conquer the angry one by not getting angry; conquer the wicked by goodness; conquer the stingy by generosity, and the liar by speaking the truth.[Verse 223]” - Siddhārtha Gautama

29. “God will never disappoint us… If deep in our hearts we suspect that God does not love us and cannot manage our affairs as well as we can, we certainly will not submit to His discipline. …To the unbeliever the fact of suffering only convinces him that God is not to be trusted, does not love us. To the believer, the opposite is true.” - Elisabeth Elliot

30. “Being good is easy, what is difficult is being just.” - Victor Hugo

31. “Feeling good about yourself is not the same thing as doing good. Good policy is more important than good feelings.” - Theodore Dalrymple

32. “Poor God, how often He is blamed for all the suffering in theworld. It’s like praising Satan for allowing all the good that happens.” - E.A. Bucchianeri

33. “Know you not that a good man does nothing for appearance sake, but for the sake of having done right?” - Epictetus

34. “it’s that sense of powerlessness that destroyed my soul. i cannot be as good as i would like to be.nor as bad as i think i need to be.i think you have the same doubts that your goodness was not rewarded” - paulo coelho-the devil and miss prym

35. “All religions are good 'in principle' - but unfortunately this abstract Good has only rarely prevented their practitioners from behaving like bastards.” - Paul Karl Feyerabend

36. “[...] so important to believe in a concept of goodness, even if we make it up ourselves. We don't really make it up. it's there, isn't it?""Oh, yes, it's there," she said. "It's there because we put it there.” - Anne Rice

37. “Christians talk as though goodness was their idea but good behavior doesn't have any religious origin. Our prisons are filled with the devout.” - Andy Rooney

38. “wealth does not bring goodness, but goodness brings wealth and every other blessing, both to the individual and to the state” - Socrates

39. “Goodness preaches constantly, wants to change humanity, to work miracles from one day to the next, makes a show of its substance, wants to question essentials, but in fact is most often just hollow, lacking in substance, essence itself. A good word which has not yet been put into practice holds within itself every virgin possibility and is more than a good deed, the outcome of which is dubious, its effect arguable. In general words are always more than deeds.” - Deszo Koszstolanyi

40. “I have always known that the best of the Saracens could out-Christian many of us Christians.” - Ellis Peters

41. “Life wants each of us to live on the 'A Team' -      Wider, ever more intense Acceptance of good in our lives.      Wider, ever more intense Awareness of good in our lives.      Wider, ever more intense Action for good in our lives.www.upwardjoy.com” - Laura Teresa Marquez

42. “ينبغي ألا نندم على حبٍ أو احساس عشناهُ يومًا بكل الصدق، فسوفَ تكشفُ لنا الأيامُ أن ما بقى داخلنا من مشاعر الحب كان أجمل و أبقى مما في أعماقِ انسانٍ تخلّى عنا او غدرَ بنا، لأن الذي يصنعُ الفضيلة لا يندمُ عليها، والذي يرسمُ خطوطَ الجمال لا يعنيه أبدًا أن يرسم غيره أشكالَ القبح.” - فاروق جويدة

43. “Don't go on discussing what a good person should be. Just be one.” - Marcus Aurelius

44. “Do not act as if you had ten thousand years to throw away. Death stands at your elbow. Be good for something while you live and it is in your power.” - Marcus Aurelius

45. “It is certain that an atom of goodness on the path of faith is never lost.” - Rumi

46. “How good life is when one does something good and just!” - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

47. “Pretend to be good always and even God will be fooled.” - Kurt Vonnegut

48. “But try to remember that a good man can never die. You will see your brother many times again-in the streets, at home, in all the places of the town. The person of a man may go, but the best part of him stays. It stays forever.” - William Saroyan

49. “In the sense of Lewis, I am a moderately 'good man'".~R. Alan Woods [2012]” - R. Alan Woods

50. “The goodness of the world grew like moss in cracks, she thought. It grew, somehow, with hidden roots, nourished by something unseen.” - K.J. Bishop

51. “I don't understand why people care so much about showing that they are good; because I am rather comfortable with having badness, quite okay with being inexplicable. They tire themselves so. The light is beautiful; but light can't hide treasures like the darkness can.” - C. JoyBell C.

52. “Be nice. Be good. Be happy. If people everywhere were to keep to this simple creed, there'd be few problems left in the world to fret about.” - Richelle E. Goodrich

53. “Perhaps there really is a good that exists; for a century of darkness to be eschewed by a single flame; for a decade of evil done to the heart to be undone by simple and unplanned acts of kindness! There must be a goodness, after all! But we don't find it when we're looking for it; not in church, not in a cathedral, not even in our own homes! We find it when we've fallen down so hard, are downtrodden so low; and there is one true friend who picks us up; or one random person who takes us in! And we realize goodness was never in the places we thought it was! It was all along in the most humble of places: bound up in the heart of a true friend.” - C. JoyBell C.

54. “And now it [grass] seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves, Tenderly will I use you curling grass,It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men, It may be if I had known them I would have loved them, It may be you from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mother's laps, And here you are the mothers' laps."- Song of Myself: 6” - Walt Whitman

55. “Some people have goodness and merit buried deep inside and we glimpse it and see its value but ultimately it's covered by so much dirt that it's a 24/7 exercise in archaeology.” - Kelli Jae Baeli

56. “We each have words for "love" in our languages. What would the world look like if we acted on that one word for humanity's sake?” - Julie Saffrin

57. “One day you will tell me how to change what I cannot yet describe without my words swelling HUGE, vowels vanishing, tears washing ink away.” - Alasdair Gray

58. “The danger in trying to do good is that the mind comes to confuse the intent of goodness with the act of doing things well.” - Ursula K. Le Guin

59. “The Church makes no man less free than he was before. But we chiefly value freedom in order to give it away; every man who loves surrenders his freedom, whether his passion be the love of a woman, the love of a cause, or the love of God. . . Hence: "Thy will be done on earth as it is in Heaven. Everyone wants the things that only a love of God will bring to him, but most men today seek them in the wrong places. That is why no one comes to God without a revolution of the spirit; he must stop seeking his good in Godlessness.” - Fulton J. Sheen

60. “I cannot encourage any fabrication even for the sake of making people feel good. If I were to fabricate consciously and knowingly, I would not only be ordaining myself their enemy, but also ordaining myself God's enemy.” - Criss Jami

61. “Miss B. says, "It's a mama's faith what keeps her children right. I'm not talkin' 'bout the churchgoin' kind, neither. Miss Mabel's got faith in goodness. Tell me you can't help but believe in it too just by lookin' at her.” - Ami McKay

62. “I will think of you every time I need to be reminded that there is beauty and goodness in the world.” - Arthur Golden

63. “...goodness is not the absence of evil - it's the light that pushes back the darkness...” - John Geddes

64. “I sometimes think that shame, mere awkward, senseless shame, does as much towards preventing good acts and straightforward happiness as any of our vices can do.” - C.S. Lewis

65. “No,' said Gould, with an unusual and convincing gravity; 'I do not believe that being perfectly good in all respects would make a man merry.' 'Well,' said Michael quietly, 'will you tell me one thing? Which of us has ever tried it?” - G.K. Chesterton

66. “If Innocent is happy, it is because he is innocent. If he can defy the conventions, it is just because he can keep the commandments. It is just because he does not want to kill but to excite to life that a pistol is still as exciting to him as it is to a schoolboy. It is just because he does not want to steal, because he does not covet his neighbour's goods, that he has captured the trick (oh, how we all long for it!), the trick of coveting his own goods. It is just because he does not want to commit adultery that he achieves the romance of sex; it is just because he loves one wife that he has a hundred honeymoons.” - G.K. Chesterton

67. “The fifth gift is Hope. Through each passage and season, may you trust the goodness of life.” - Charlene Costanzo

68. “We too often forget that not only is there 'a soul of goodness in things evil,' but very generally also, a soul of truth in things erroneous.” - Herbert Spencer

69. “The evil in the world must not make me doubt the existence of God. There could be no evil if there were no God. Before there can be a hole in a uniform, there must be a uniform; before there is death, there must be life; before there is error, there must be truth; before there is a crime, there must be liberty and law; before there is a war, there must be peace; before there is a devil, there must be a God, rebellion against whom made the devil.” - Fulton J. Sheen

70. “There is one type of gambling which should always be encouraged. It is betting on goodness. When a person has wronged you, be good to him. If he adds insult to injury, double the bet. And keep on doubling it. You will surely win!” - Dada J.P. Vaswani

71. “For a water drop, the most beautiful house is a leaf; and for a man: The goodness! Let the goodness be your home you permanently live in!” - Mehmet Murat ildan

72. “I will bestir myself,' was her resolution, 'and try to be wise if I cannot be good.” - Charlotte Brontë

73. “Evil is predicable; Good is paradoxical.” - Lara Biyuts