Unkindness Quotes

“Anger, resentment and jealousy doesn't change the heart of others-- it only changes yours.”
― Shannon Alder, 300 Questions to Ask Your Parents Before It's Too Late

“I wish I could tell you how lonely I am. How cold and harsh it is here. Everywhere there is conflict and unkindness. I think God has forsaken this place. I believe I have seen hell and it's white, it's snow-white.”
― Sandy Welch

“All too often women believe it is a sign of commitment, an expression of love, to endure unkindness or cruelty, to forgive and forget. In actuality, when we love rightly we know that the healthy, loving response to cruelty and abuse is putting ourselves out of harm's way.”
― Bell Hooks, All About Love: New Visions

“It's not what people do to you, but what they mean, that hurts.”
― E.M. Forster, The Longest Journey

“I felt the kind of desperation, I think, that cancels the possibility of empathy...that makes you unkind.”
― Sue Miller, While I Was Gone

“Remorse is a terrible thing to bear, Pam, one of the worst of all punishments in this life. To wish undone something you have done, to wish you could look back on kindness to someone you love, instead of on unkindness - that is a very terrible thing.”
― Enid Blyton, House at the Corner

“Punishing a person for the wrongs of another makes about as much sense as throwing up to enjoy the meal a second time.”
― Richelle E. Goodrich, Making Wishes: Quotes, Thoughts, & a Little Poetry for Every Day of the Year

“If one believed in angels one would feel that they must love us best when we are asleep and cannot hurt each other; and what a mercy it is that once in every twenty-four hours we are too utterly weary to go on being unkind.”
― Elizabeth von Arnim, The Solitary Summer

“No matter how kind you are, always expect a few imbeciles.”
― Criss Jami, Healology

“The biggest threat against the survival of humanity is not brutality and unkindness, it is stupidity and selfishness.”
― M.F. Moonzajer

“Come, gentlemen, I hope we shall drink down all unkindness.”
― William Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor

“Her father sat her down and spoke to her with great seriousness. "You are not a witch, Katerina. There is magic in the world, and some of it is wholesome, and some of it is not, but it is a thing that is in the blood, and it is not in yours.
"The foolish will always treat you badly, because they think you are not beautiful," he said, and she knew this was true. Plain Kate. She was a plain as a stick and thin as a stick and flat as a stick. Her nose was too long and her brows too strong. Her father kissed her twice, once above each brow. "We cannot help what fools think. But understand, it is your skill with a blade that draws this talk. If you want to give up your carving, you have my blessing."
"I will never give it up," she answered.”
― Erin Bow, Plain Kate

“Ugly and ungainly. The least dependable creature you ever met. Just when you think you understand her, she changes. If only I had a son," he said bitterly.
Over and over he disparaged her, and George would have thought that Beatrice would be so used to it, she could not be hurt further. But he saw her neck grow stiffer and stiffer.”
― Mette Ivie Harrison, The Princess and the Hound

“Man's meanness is a fuse in search of a flame.”
― Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Marina

“A nod at Beatrice who held absolutely still. "She said she would come with me. She insisted on it. She stamped her little foot at me."
He pointed down to her toes as if she were a child yet.
Then he straightened his shoulders. "But I sent her back to the nursery, where she belonged, and told her to play with her dolls instead. As everyone knows, a female on a hunt is a distraction at best and bad luck at worse."

Which explained why Beatrice went into the woods with her hound alone, George thought. She looked now as though she had gone to some other place where she could not hear her father's words and thus could not be hurt by them. George wondered how often she was forced to go to that place.

Did King Helm not see how much she was like him? It seemed she was rejected for any sign of femininity yet also rejected for not showing enough femininity, How could she win?”
― Mette Ivie Harrison, The Princess and the Hound

“I see
In many an eye that measures me
The mortal sickness of a mind
Too unhappy to be kind.
Undone with misery, all they can
Is to hate their fellow man;

- from Poem XLI”
― A.E. Housman, A Shropshire Lad

“The saddest thing you can do as a human is to discuss one person with another for the sake of it. The unkindest thing you can do to a human is to tarnish their reputation in front of others just to make yourself look good. An unfortunate thing that you can do to a person is to be unapologetically direct and not understand their side. However, the WORST thing you can do is to slip in ‘little’ white lies just to save yourself from confrontations & emotional conversations.
Complain about each other to each other.
Have your freedom … G E N T L Y.
Discuss your mind – politely.”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“The unkindest thing you can do to a human is to tarnish their reputation in front of others just to make yourself look good.”
― Sijdah Hussain, Red Sugar, No More

“I knew it was easier to drill things in than to take them out.'
'It's like a screw!' Craig-Vyvyan shouted.... 'If you pull off it's head, you never get it out.”
― Mark Helprin, Freddy and Fredericka

“An unkindness for an unkindness does not goodness make.”
― Akiroq Brost

“We are living in an era in which cruel and shocking acts are done just to provide pleasure and entertainment.”
― Michael Bassey Johnson, The Book of Maxims, Poems and Anecdotes

“I'll never understand how someone half my size can manage to make me feel so small.”
― Vitor Martins, Here the Whole Time

“Vonnegut did not seem to be saying, as I understood Hem[ingway] to be saying, that his Terrible Event had forever exempted him from the usual human obligations of being kind, attempting to understand, behaving decently. On the contrary, Vonnegut seemed to feel that unkindness--a simple, idiotic failure of belief in the human, by men and their systems--had been the cause of his Terrible Event, and that what he had learned from this experience was not the importance of being tough and hard and untouchable, but the importance of preserving the kindness in ourselves at all costs.”
― George Saunders, The Braindead Megaphone

“By speaking with courtesy and respect, you are offering a wonderful gift to yourself, a useful embarrassment to the unkind, and a good example to bystanders.”
― Giannis Delimitsos

“that everyone has a capacity for evil. And we’ve all seen it, and done it, even if we think we haven’t—there’s the slight in conversation that wounds another person, the words we know will cause pain to a loved one but we utter them anyway, and the unkindness that could have been avoided. But then there are people in another league, if you will, people who are capable of so much more, who harbor an evil so deep it scars all our souls. That kind of darkness can lie dormant, as if in a barren desert, but then . . . but then circumstances change to allow their evil to become truly, truly terrible, a boiling storm that encompasses all in its wake.”
― Jacqueline Winspear, Journey to Munich

“Not committing the so-called deadly sins is not enough to avoid bad juju in this life, or the next. Those everyday little wrongdoings, like ingratitude, unkindness, and entitlement, are hefty cornerstones of karmic debt.”
― Anthon St. Maarten

“One act of kindness is more powerful than a thousand acts of spite.”
― Matshona Dhliwayo

“Unhappiness and the like often inspire us to perform random acts of unkindness.”
― Mokokoma Mokhonoana, P for Pessimism: A Collection of Funny yet Profound Aphorisms

“I watched him, sardonic, cynical. A great poet, truly, yet unkind. The gifts of our nature seem not to modify the manner of our behaviour.”
― Jeanette Winterson, Frankissstein: A Love Story

“Memories could not be unmemoried, only shuffled so as not to be in the forefront of things.”
― Rivers Solomon, An Unkindness of Ghosts