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In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World

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Bruce Reyes-Chow

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“Kindness is not a journey for the meek and mild. For those of us who have been steeped in ways of being that are not kind, it takes tremendous energy to purge ourselves of patterns and behaviors that are not kind. Every day we have to choose to commit to live out kindness that day.”

ChangeKindnessSelf ImprovementDignitySelf Reflection
Book:In Defense of Kindness: Why It Matters, How It Changes Our Lives, and How It Can Save the World
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“Kindness, after all, comes to him naturally; he was hatched in its lucky genre and embraces its attributes effortlessly. Gentleness, generosity and compromise are not for him learned skills; they have always been with him . . . It may, for all I know, have existed in his family for generations. He is not at the frontier as I am. For me kindness is an alien quality; and like a difficult French verb I must learn it slowly, painfully, and probably imperfectly. It does not swim freely in my bloodstream -- I have to inject it artificially at the risk of all sorts of unknown factors. It does not wake with me in the mornings; every day I have to coax it anew into existence, breathe on it to keep it alive, practice it to keep it in good working order. And most difficult of all, I have to exercise it in such a way that it looks spontaneous and genuine; I have to see that it flows without hesitation as it does from its true practitioners, its lucky heirs who acquire it without laborious seeking . . .”

Kindness
Book:The Box Garden
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“You can't condone exploitation and oppression, and demand not to be exploited or oppressed. You can't rule over the lives of others, and demand to be master of your own life. You can't walk around stabbing animals (or paying others to do it for you), and complain when someone does something to hurt you. You have to put out what you want back. Arguing that animals are small brained and therefore it's ok to mistreat them, is small brained. Arguing that animals eat animals and that's why you do it too, is behaving like an animal. Arguing that you're an apex predator when you've probably never even stabbed a single pig in your life makes no sense at all. Arguing "protein!" just shows how little you understand about nutrition. Arguing that our ancestors did so, is simply primitive. Kindness and compassion are not things to be mocked and jeered at, they are positive traits that are vital for the future of mankind and for the moral progress of humanity. If we are ever to see an end to tyranny of our own kind, by our own kind, we have to stop behaving as if we are the only species that matter! As Gandhi once said, you can judge the moral progress of a nation by the way it treats its animals.”

TruthCompassionKindnessProgressVeganAnarchyMoralsAnimalsVeganismGandhi
Author:Mango Wodzak
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“As the native drum kept rhythm with the nighttime symphony of the African bush, the cry of a hyrax (a small, furry animal that sounded a lot scarier than it looked) pierced the night. A hyena howled. A warthog ran through our camp. What was he running from? Sitting in front of my tent, I tried to figure everything out. I wouldn’t have called what I did prayer but maybe wonder. Night after night, I’d listened to the rush of a river or watched my own personal light show as lightning spider-webbed across the heavens, danced in the distance, and serenaded me with a muffled growl. Until a crash—so loud it seemed to break the sky—caused me to twitch as a shiver ran up my spine. “You know how it is when you feel someone staring at you from across the room?” I said to Truth. “You turn to meet the gaze. It was like that, but I saw no one. I just felt a comforting presence as we sat together in silence.” “You think it was God?” she asked. “Yeah, but I called him Fred. Not so overwhelming, more personal.””

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Book:Mary Me: One Woman’s Incredible Adventure with God
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