For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
Source: Leaves of Grass, Song of Myself (1892 edition)
Topic
Goodness is deceptively simple as a concept and enormously difficult as a practice. The quotes here examine it without sentimentality — not as a comfortable aspiration but as a daily discipline that requires honesty, courage, and the willingness to be inconvenienced. The good person, these writers suggest, is not primarily the person who avoids obvious wrongs but the person who actively pursues what is right even when it costs something. These reflections trace goodness through its component virtues — honesty, generosity, fairness, compassion — while resisting the reduction of goodness to any single trait. Several voices here also probe the relationship between goodness and happiness, noting both that genuinely good people tend to live better and that the pursuit of goodness for the sake of happiness is a subtle self-defeat. Goodness, these words suggest, is worth pursuing for its own sake — because the alternative, in any honest accounting, is not a life one would actually choose.
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts.
They value not because it is humane, lovely, and good for man; they only prize it because it was Christ who taught it.
Make it not any longer a matter of dispute or discourse, what are the signs and proprieties of a good man, but really and actually to be such.
No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.