Delphic Maxim #93

Maxim #93 – Deal kindly with everyone

Kindness can brighten another person’s day, and it can make you and everyone around you feel better too. A simple and genuine act releases the chemical called oxytocin, which gives us feelings of warmth and connection. Witnessing another’s act of kindness induces the same internal process.

When you perform a service with no expectation of reward and with a pure motive for helping someone, you will reap the unforeseen benefits of mood boost, compassion, empathy, and self-esteem.

It calms the body’s stress response and may improve cognition and interpersonal relationships.

Dare we say – it can make you happier.

An act of kindness can be as simple as holding a door for someone or allowing someone with fewer items to get in front of you at the grocery store or giving your seat to someone on the train.

The phrase Do a Good Turn Daily is a motto in Boys and Girls Scouting, encouraging Scouts to perform acts of kindness and service as a daily habit. It’s a wonderful practice. If you seek out ways to add to someone’s day, you truly change your corner of the world.

The 147 Delphic Maxims [as cited by Stobaeus] are ancient guidelines and advice for living a proper and happy life. They are enduring and eternal in many aspects, although one must consider the times in which they were written and adapt the language accordingly.  

They remain an important legacy of human history and continue to provide wisdom for the ages. The maxims live because they have been preserved, reiterated, and reinterpreted throughout the oral and written traditions of the Hellenic world – not as absolutes, but as living guidance.

Stobaeus was a Greek writer from about 500 A.D. Clearly a well-read scholar in his day, he managed to safeguard much of the prose and poetry of ancient Greece. To him we owe a great debt.

Download all the Delphic Maxims in a colorful PDF – click here.