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“Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty,” Anne Herbert wrote.

A watercolor reproduction in “Birds of New York” by Louis Agassiz Fuertes, later reproduced in “Birds of America” by Thomas Gilbert Pearson et al. Public domain

In 1982, in a Sausalito, California, restaurant, writer Anne Herbert jotted down the sentence, “Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty” on a placemat. She was reacting to a phrase then in vogue regarding crime: “random acts of violence and senseless acts of cruelty.”

Even before the internet, her words became a popular cultural mantra, repeated frequently in conversations and print and even found on bumper stickers across the nation. Many people took Ms. Herbert’s maxim to heart, going out of their way, for example, to help a stranger in need.