Idiom
be cruel to be kind
Meaning
To act cruelly in order to achieve a positive outcome in the future.
Meaning adapted from Wiktionary, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Examples
“I must be cruel to be kind and stop your bad habit.”
“The doctor had to be cruel to be kind by forcing the patient to walk immediately after the surgery.”
“By refusing to provide the funding that had enabled his son's recklessness, the father was being cruel to be kind, hoping to finally teach him the value of responsibility.”
Examples
simple
“I must be cruel to be kind and stop your bad habit.”
contextual
“The doctor had to be cruel to be kind by forcing the patient to walk immediately after the surgery.”
complex
“By refusing to provide the funding that had enabled his son's recklessness, the father was being cruel to be kind, hoping to finally teach him the value of responsibility.”
Origin
From William Shakespeare's Hamlet, Act 3, Scene 4: "I must be cruel, only to be kind: / Thus bad begins and worse remains behind."
Key words
Related idioms
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