Kindness Facts

Paul Walker was browsing a Santa Barbara jewelry store when he overheard a young couple - a veteran just back from Iraq and his fiancée - admiring an engagement ring they could not afford. Walker walked up to the manager and said put it on his tab. The price was nearly $10,000. He insisted on complete anonymity and the couple did not learn who paid for it for almost a decade. The truth only came out after he died.

Acts of kindness make us happier and healthier.

In 2007, a customer kindly gave a $10,000 tip to a Pizza Hut waitress after hearing she had financial troubles which had forced her to drop out of college.

In 2011, an elderly woman from Memphis who ordered pizza everyday for 3 years straight was saved by a delivery woman when she failed to place an order for 3 days.

Carlos Vasquez, a dry cleaner in New York, has a sign outside his shop that reads: If you are unemployed and need an outfit clean for an interview, we will clean it for free.

Jack White's mother couldn't find work, so Detroit's Masonic Temple hired her as an usher. Years later, the massive concert hall she once worked in faced foreclosure over unpaid taxes. White quietly paid off the entire debt himself, telling no one. The Temple's president later revealed who had saved it, renaming the theater in his honor. It still carries his name today.

Iowa farmers gave 36 breeding hogs to Japan after two typhoons wrecked the farms of Yamanashi in 1959. The Air Force flew the hogs over, and 35 survived the three-day trip. Within nine years, about 500,000 hogs in Japan traced back to them. When Iowa flooded in 1993, Yamanashi sent help back. Iowa and Yamanashi are still sister states.

Patrick Moriarty was 22 when he told his 9th-grade earth science students to circle one date on their worksheets: a solar eclipse. He gave the same assignment to every class he taught for the next 16 years. More than 100 former students showed up 46 years later. Rochester was cloudy. Nobody cared.

In 2013 Christian Bucks, a second-grader at Roundtown Elementary in York, Pennsylvania, saw a picture of a bench at a school in Germany. A child who felt lonely at recess could sit on it, and another kid would come ask them to play. He asked his principal for one, and the school put it in. Today kids in all 50 states sit on buddy benches when they need a friend.

Jesse Eisenberg gave one of his kidneys to a stranger. He had wanted to donate for ten years. A doctor friend told him strangers could receive it too. He finally did it in December 2025, at a hospital in New York. He chose never to learn the stranger's name. "It just seemed like an obvious thing to do," he said.

While filming Matilda, Mara Wilson's mother was dying of cancer. Danny DeVito and Rhea Perlman quietly cared for Mara like their own daughter. DeVito secretly took an unfinished cut of the film to the hospital and screened it for her dying mother. He kept it quiet for years.

George Michael spent decades secretly giving away millions - and almost nobody knew until he died in 2016. He paid a stranger's £15,000 IVF bill after seeing her cry on Deal or No Deal, and donated £100,000 every Easter to charity via anonymous phone-ins. The woman he helped named her son Seth George in his honour.

Muhammad Ali got a call: Joe was on a 9th-floor fire escape in Los Angeles. He would not come down. Police, a psychologist, and a chaplain had all tried and failed. Ali drove over, leaned out a window, and said: "You're my brother. I love you and I couldn't lie to you." Twenty minutes later he had his arm around Joe and walked him inside. Ali drove him to the hospital himself.

Gander, Newfoundland is a town of just 10,000 people. When US airspace shut down on September 11, 2001, 38 jetliners carrying about 6,600 passengers and crew were ordered to land there. Residents turned schools, churches and legion halls into dorms, cooked around the clock, and refused every payment offered. Bus drivers even walked off a picket line to help. The last stranded flight did not leave until September 15.

Shaquille O'Neal has quietly rebuilt basketball courts for 30 years. The first was in Orlando, where Marquis Daniels grew up. Daniels made the NBA and told O'Neal: "Because you fixed it up, I'm here." O'Neal has since rebuilt six more courts - he's still doing it, one court at a time.

In 2011 a tornado tore through Joplin, Missouri, and a few competition barbecue cooks towed their giant smokers over, figuring on four days and 5,000 meals. More cooks kept arriving, and they stayed nearly two weeks and served 120,000 meals to families and first responders. That crew became Operation BBQ Relief, now past 12 million meals, and the smokers still roll out to wrecked towns.

Ryan Seacrest started in radio as a high school intern at an Atlanta station. Since 2010 he and his family have built real radio and TV studios inside children's hospitals, and the kids are the hosts. They run their own shows and interview the stars who visit, while other kids join in from their rooms. Kids in 14 hospitals still go on air.

Bill Gross's parents couldn't afford to pass down their North Dakota farm, so he became a 747 captain. Over the Pacific, he told a copilot his retirement plan: buy a tractor and help farmers in crisis. A friend said not to wait, so in 2005, still flying, he started Farm Rescue. It has helped more than 1,300 families and is looking for the next one this harvest.

A Maryland hunter pulled over to help a woman load a deer into her trunk. A car had hit it, and she was taking it home because her kids were hungry. In 1997, he got two butchers to process deer donated by hunters for food banks. His program has since handed out more than 24 million servings of meat. Every deer season, hunters still drop off deer at its butchers.

A construction foreman in South Bend, Indiana, was building a new wing for a children's hospital. Patients on the sixth floor looked down on his site. So he cut a giant Where's Waldo out of plywood, his daughter helped paint it, and he hid it among the scaffolding. Every time a child spotted Waldo, the foreman moved him somewhere new.

In the mid-2000s, a Wisconsin dentist began paying kids a dollar a pound for their leftover Halloween candy. His own children told him it was a terrible idea. He sent the candy to troops overseas, and thousands of dentists across the country joined in. One military charity alone has shipped nearly 600,000 pounds of donated candy. Dental offices still collect it every November.

Rodney Smith Jr. was driving home in Huntsville, Alabama, when he pulled over to help an elderly stranger struggling to mow his lawn. That night he decided to mow free lawns for seniors, veterans and single moms. Then he asked kids to do the same: 50 free lawns each. More than 6,000 kids across the country have signed up. Those who finish all 50 get a new mower, trimmer and blower.

Sylvester Stallone arrived in Los Angeles with his wife, a bullmastiff and little money left, and the one friend he could call was Henry Winkler, the Fonz. Winkler showed up and steered them to a motel they could afford for maybe two nights. Stallone went on to write Rocky. In his new memoir, he says Winkler came like a god-send.

Brittany Bergquist and her 12-year-old brother Robbie saw a news report about a soldier's $7,600 phone bill from calling home. They started with $21 to help, then found a way to recycle old phones into calling cards. Their charity now reports more than 400 million minutes provided to deployed troops, and over 3,000 drop-off sites still collect old phones.