“We are all sentenced to solitary confinement inside our own skins, for life.”
– Tennessee Williams
“To love another person is to see the face of God.”
– Victor Hugo, Les Misérables
Consider Williams’ and Hugo’s quotes the two opposite ends of the philanthropy spectrum. At the one extreme you have complete isolation from your conspecifics: a dreadful state of affairs, in which you feel so alienated from your fellow man that you cannot fathom finding solace in his company. But the closer you near the other extreme, the better you will realize that we are all interconnected – a whole comprised of seven billion or so parts, each connected by heart strings.
An actual twitter exchange between Neil deGrasse Tyson and Norm Macdonald further illustrates this point. In 2019 the award-winning astrophysicist tweeted this:
The Universe is blind to our sorrows and indifferent to our pains.
Have a nice day!
— Neil deGrasse Tyson (@neiltyson) April 3, 2019
In response, the guy who played Frank in Billy Madison tweeted this:
Neil, there is a logic flaw in your little aphorism that seems quite telling. Since you and I are part of the Universe, then we would also be indifferent and uncaring. Perhaps you forgot, Neil, that we are not superior to the Universe but merely a fraction of it. Nice day, indeed https://t.co/bSYUd7EH91
— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) April 11, 2019
We present the following collection of quotes about helping others so you can become more like Victor Hugo and Norm MacDonald.
Quotes About Helping Others and Kindness
“Protecting the rights of even the least individual among us is basically the only excuse the government has for even existing.”
– Ronald Reagan
“The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson
“Those who are happiest are those who do the most for others.”
– Booker T. Washington
“No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.”
– Charles Dickens
“If you think you are too small to make a difference, try sleeping with a mosquito.”
– Dalai Lama
“What you do makes a difference, and you have to decide what kind of difference you want to make.”
– Jane Goodall
“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”
– Edith Wharton
“People who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
– Steve Jobs
“How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.”
– Anne Frank