You're not being very pleasant

After watching this video by my favourite author, John Green, I recently watched the 1950 film Harvey (that, admittedly, my father had been nagging me to watch for years. Sorry Dad). Unsurprisingly I did find it to be quite an important movie, as quirky as it may be. To me the point of the movie can be summed u by one quote that has suck with me. Elwood quotes his mother in saying, 
"In this world, Elwood, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant." 
This was important to me because I had spent to much of my time trying to be smart. I try to read all the right books, watch the right movies and listen to the right music. It was an exhausting part of my being that I felt the need to consume as much cultural knowledge as possible before my time was up, lest I grow old to be an uneducated proletarian.
While education and cultural knowledge are still important to me this movie brought me down into reality reminding me that knowledge was not all that was important in life. So for now I have chosen to be "oh so pleasant."

Herein lies the problem. Some people make it very difficult to be pleasant and finding myself sufficiently short of Gandhi's patients when words of cruelty are gushing out of the mouths around me. For me to respond in the words circling my mind would not me pleasant of me. Nor would it be pleasant for me to release my frustration to another by retailing the tail. I am forever attempting to better myself and I feel this is a necessary point for improvement. Can can one be pleasant when they cannot let annoyances pass over them like water off a ducks back? I will be sure to update when I have found a successful method to do so. At this point I would like to note that for my own personal purposes I have altered the statement to "kind" in place of "pleasant" as I feel that is a more desirable and more complete attribute that I would wish to have associated with my name. So, where is the line drawn? It is more kind to point out the ill-intentioned words and acts of others in a hope that it may advantage them, and others, in the future. Or is it more kind to simply keep ones mouth shut and choose not to participate?

Once again I end the week with many questions left unanswered. Perhaps as I gain life experience some of my questions will be answered. Here's, once again, to hoping.