You cannot be kind unless you have all the other virtues.

[soso]

On kindness

Love is something more stern and splendid than mere kindness. 

For about a hundred years we have so concentrated /on one of the virtues—“kindness” or mercy—

that most of us do not feel anything /except kindness /to be really good or anything but cruelty to be really bad. 

[Such lopsided ethical developments] are not uncommon,

and other ages too have had their pet virtues and curious insensibilities. 

And if one virtue must be cultivated /at the expense of all the rest, none has a higher claim than mercy. . . 

The real trouble is that “kindness” is a quality /fatally easy to attribute to ourselves on quite inadequate grounds. 

Everyone feels benevolent /if nothing happens to be annoying him at the moment. 

* 'happen to be'  implies some sort of coincidence or irony or causation. 

Thus a man easily comes /to console himself for all his other vices /by a conviction that “his heart’s in the right place”

and “he wouldn’t hurt a fly,” though in fact he has never made the slightest sacrifice /for a fellow creature. 

We think () we are kind /when we are only happy:

it is not so easy, on the same grounds, [to imagine oneself temperate, chaste, or humble]. 

You cannot be kind /unless you have all the other virtues. 

If, being cowardly, conceited and slothful, you have never yet done [a fellow creature] [great mischief], 

that is only because your neighbour’s welfare has not yet happened to conflict with your safety, self-approval, or ease. 

Every vice leads /to cruelty.

From The Problem of Pain
Compiled in Words to Live By