Skip to content

Yet good is the drink, evil only a poison that is sometimes in the dregs: in the course of living we are likely to shake the glass—no fault of the wine. It is good to sit quiet in the sun: there is no nicely balanced opposing evil to that. Where is there any matching evil to a hearing of the G Minor Fugue? As absurd as asking, What is the opposite of a tree?

— Edgar Pangborn A Mirror for Observers (1954)

Another quote →

More quotes by Edgar Pangborn

I learned some years back that human nature is volatile stuff in a world full of lighted matches.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

If you’re interested in ethics, you could do worse than think in terms of geological time.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One who can define kindness only as the absence of cruelty has surely not begun to understand the nature of either.

Good Neighbors and Other Strangers (1972)

I notice men themselves have never invented a god capable of understanding them.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

One would think that the mere shortness of life would be a reminder that to destroy beauty is to destroy one’s own self too.

A Mirror for Observers (1954)

All Edgar Pangborn quotes →

Attribution

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