The wording comes from an anonymous English essay titled “Kind Words,” credited to the New York Evangelist and reprinted across American papers from March 1847, which reads “Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much.” Abridged reprints that May were signed off “Pascal.” — a byline later quote books appear to have read as Blaise Pascal, who died in 1662 and wrote in French.
“Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much” Not Blaise Pascal. Condensed from the anonymous essay "Kind Words," credited to the New York Evangelist and reprinted 11 March 1847: "Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much." Abridged reprints were signed "Pascal." — the likely root of the misattribution. Via Quotle.info
⚠ The slide-ready mistake: crediting this to Blaise Pascal. Use the credit shown above instead.
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Evoking the world of Unknown — a New York Evangelist writer — Anonymous essayist, American religious press. Theme: "Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much". Atmospheric and restrained, cinematic directional light, a muted period-appropriate palette, fine grain and texture. Compose with generous empty space for the quote and a small credit line. No lettering in the image itself.
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Provenance
The 1847 essay
Essay
Kind Words
Credited source
New York Evangelist
Earliest located printing
Green-Mountain Freeman (Montpelier, Vt.), 11 March 1847, p. 1
Attribution
Unsigned in the fuller printing; abridged reprints from May 1847 signed “Pascal.”
KIND WORDS DO NOT COST MUCH. — They never blister the tongue or lips. And we have never heard of any mental trouble arising from this quarter. Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much.
1. They help one’s own good nature and good will. Soft words soften our own soul. Angry words are fuel to the flame of wrath, and make it blaze the more fiercely.
2. Kind words make other people good natured. Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and sarcastic words irritate them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful.
There is such a rush of all other kinds of words, in our days, that it seems desirable to give kind words a chance among them. … Kind words also produce their own image on men’s souls. And a beautiful image it is. They soothe and quiet and comfort the hearer. They shame him out of his sour, morose, unkind feelings. We have not yet begun to use kind words in such abundance as they ought to be used.
Abridged reprint, 1847
Transcribed from the Library of Congress OCR of the 1847 printings; spelling and obvious scanning errors lightly normalised, wording unchanged. The fuller 11 March 1847 text runs several paragraphs longer and closes with the credit “New York Evangelist.”
1845 — The phrase is already a commonplace of the American religious press. A different essay, also headed “Kind Words” and credited to the N. E. Puritan, runs in the Religious Herald of 31 May 1845 ↗: “Kind words do not cost much, therefore freely use them.” No Pascal anywhere near it.
11 March 1847 — The essay that actually contains the line appears in the Green-Mountain Freeman ↗, in full and closing with the credit “New York Evangelist.” The sentence reads: “Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much.”
May 1847 — A condensed version starts travelling the exchanges. The Morning Star of 19 May ↗ prints it unsigned; other papers that month append the sign-off “Pascal.”
21 August 1847 — The abridged, “Pascal.”-signed text reaches a mass audience in the New-York Daily Tribune ↗. From a newspaper byline to a French philosopher is a short, silent step.
✓Public domain
The essay was published in an American newspaper in 1847 — long before the 1931 threshold — so the text is in the public domain in the United States. Because it was composed in English, there is no translation whose separate copyright could apply; the author is unidentified, but anonymity does not revive rights on a work this old.
Fact-check
How a byline became a philosopher
This is not a case of a quote drifting toward a famous name for no reason. There is a documented mechanism, and it is visible on the page.
✕
The attribution itselfBlaise Pascal (1623–1662) Not his
Pascal died 185 years before this essay circulated, and wrote in French. The line appears in no work of his: Project Gutenberg’s English text of the Pensées ↗ contains not one instance of “kind words,” “cost much,” “blister” or “accomplish much.”
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The likely mechanismThe “Pascal.” sign-off The culprit
Condensed reprints from May 1847 onward end with the single word “Pascal.” — including this one in the New-York Daily Tribune of 21 August 1847 ↗. In a quote book, a nineteenth-century newspaper byline and a reference to the author of the Pensées look identical.
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Why the sign-off can't be trustedThe exchange-paper editors Inconsistent
The tag was not stable. The Morning Star of 19 May 1847 ↗ ran the identical abridged essay with no attribution whatsoever, while the fuller March printing credits the New York Evangelist instead.
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The wording“Yet they accomplish much” Compressed
Nobody wrote the modern one-liner. The 1847 essay reads “Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much” — a clause of a numbered argument, later filed down into a standalone aphorism.
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The modern recordQuote aggregators Amplifier
The line is printed under Pascal’s name with no source across the major quote sites. By contrast Wikiquote’s Pascal page ↗, which tracks citations carefully, carries no kind-words quotation in any section at all.
✓The sentence belongs to an unnamed writer in the American religious press, whose essay Kind Words was credited to the New York Evangelist and reprinted in the Green-Mountain Freeman on 11 March 1847 ↗ — not to Blaise Pascal.
Context
Why this one slipped through
Most fake-quote stories end with a shrug — no source, no origin, just a famous name and a lot of repetition. This one is different: the origin survives in full, in newsprint, and it explains itself. In the spring of 1847 a short moral essay called Kind Words went around the American exchange papers, the way syndicated filler did before syndication existed. Editors clipped it, trimmed it to fit the column, and reset it. Somewhere in that process a sign-off — “Pascal.” — got attached to the short version.
That single word did all the damage. A nineteenth-century newspaper byline, quite possibly a contributor’s pen name, is indistinguishable in a quote book from a reference to the author of the Pensées. Strip the essay down to its most quotable sentence, compress “Though they do not cost much, yet they accomplish much” into “Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much,” and print it under “Pascal” — and a Vermont reprint of a New York religious weekly becomes a French mathematician’s aphorism.
The essay complains about the “rush of all other kinds of words, in our days.” Pascal had been dead 185 years.
The tell: it doesn't read like Pascal, because it isn't
The full March 1847 text is structured like a sermon outline — a numbered list, homely metaphors, a closing appeal. “Cold words freeze people, and hot words scorch them, and sarcastic words irritate them, and bitter words make them bitter, and wrathful words make them wrathful.” That cadence is American pulpit prose of the 1840s, not seventeenth-century French philosophy in translation.
The internal evidence is decisive. The essay refers to its own moment — “There is such a rush of all other kinds of words, in our days” — and to “boisterous words, and warlike words,” language at home in a period of temperance campaigns and the Mexican–American War. No French original has ever been produced, because the piece was composed in English.
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The real writer
Who actually wrote it
NYE
Unknown — a New York Evangelist writer
Active 1847 · Anonymous essayist, American religious press
The essay Kind Words first reaches us second-hand: the fullest early printing, in the Green-Mountain freeman of 11 March 1847, ends with the credit line “New York Evangelist,” meaning the Vermont paper had lifted it from that New York religious weekly. Its author is not named there, and the piece is unmistakably a work of 1840s American journalism — it complains about the “rush of all other kinds of words, in our days” and sits amid columns on Irish famine relief and the Tribune’s politics. Within weeks a condensed version was travelling the exchanges, sometimes tagged “Pascal.” and sometimes carrying no signature at all.
For writers & researchers
Cite this
Primary source
“Kind Words.” New York Evangelist, 1847. Reprinted in Green-Mountain Freeman (Montpelier, VT), March 11, 1847, p. 1. Chronicling America, Library of Congress.
This verification page
Quotle.info. “Who really said ‘Kind words do not cost much. Yet they accomplish much’?” Last verified 15 Jul 2026. https://quotle.info/who-said/kind-words-do-not-cost-much-yet-they-accomplish-much