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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.

— William Shakespeare

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Topics

Good and Evil

More quotes by William Shakespeare

Time's glory is to calm contending kings,
To unmask falsehood, and bring truth to light.

I am a man,
More sinn'd against than sinning.

King Lear (1605)

All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players:
They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts.

As You Like It (1599)

To be or not to be, that is the question.

Hamlet (1600)

Uneasy lies the head that wears a crown.

Henry IV, Part 2 (1597)

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False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil.

Socrates

I believe in evil. It is the property of all those who are certain of truth. Despair and fanaticism are only differing manifestations of evil.

Edward Teller

Of all tyrannies a tyranny sincerely exercised for the good of its victims may be the most oppressive.

C. S. Lewis God in the Dock (1970)

There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root, and it may be that he who bestows the largest amount of time and money on the needy is doing the most by his mode of life to produce that misery which he strives in vain to relieve.

Henry David Thoreau Walden (1854)

Attribution

Quote text and notes from Wikiquote: William Shakespeare (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.