William Shakespeare on Good and Evil
1564–1616 England
← All quotes by William Shakespeare
6 quotes
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
My meaning in saying he is a good man is to have you understand me that he is sufficient.
I am in this earthly world; where to do harm,
Is often laudable, to do good sometime
Accounted dangerous folly.
Macbeth (1605)
Your great goodness, out of holy pity,
Absolv'd him with an axe.
Henry VIII (1613)
Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.
There lives within the very flame of love
A kind of wick or snuff that will abate it;
And nothing is at a like goodness still;
For goodness, growing to a pleurisy,
Dies in his own too much.