Life & Wisdom Quote by Joseph Joubert

Kindness, in Joubert's framing, is not a moral transaction but a deliberate act of overpayment. "More than they deserve" is the barb: it drags the whole polite economy of merit into the room only to reject it. Deserve is the language of courts, grades, reputations, and social ledgers. Kindness, he implies, begins where that language stops being useful.

The line works because it quietly admits what polite ethics often deny: most people are difficult to love on the evidence. Joubert doesn't romanticize humanity; he concedes the case against us, then argues that kindness is precisely the choice to exceed it. There's a sharp psychological realism here. If you wait for deservingness, you love only the easy people, and you call it virtue. Joubert targets the ego hiding in "good judgment" - the self-congratulating restraint that masquerades as principle.

Context matters. Writing in the long shadow of the French Revolution, Joubert belonged to a world where "desert" had been weaponized: who merits power, who merits punishment, who merits survival. His sentence reads like a corrective to a culture intoxicated with verdicts. It also anticipates a modern problem: our tendency to make affection contingent on performance, politics, or personal brand.

Subtext: kindness is not blindness, it's surplus. It's a refusal to let your care be governed by an audit. That surplus doesn't excuse harm; it resists the thin satisfaction of withholding love as a form of control.