Kindness is not without its rocks ahead. People are apt to put it down to an easy temper and seldom recognize it as the secret striving of a generous nature; whilst, on the other hand, the ill-natured get credit for all the evil they refrain from.
ATTRIBUTION:
Honoré De Balzac (1799–1850), French novelist. Then in vol. I, ch. III, of the Comédie humaine (1845, trans. by George Saintsbury, 1971). Narrator, in A Daughter of Eve (Une Fille d’Eve), published with Massimilla Doni, Souverain (1839), first appeared in Le Siècle (1838-1839).
