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The problem of evil has its roots in the dark depths of human nature and in the secret recesses of man's relationship with transcendence.

— Luigi Pareyson

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Luigi Pareyson

Evil must be distinguished as possible and real: in God it is present as possible, and there man finds it and realises it in history.

God is being, goodness, truth, or the positive in general, but insofar as it is willed and chosen, victory over possible nothingness.

Evil is not the absence of being, the deprivation of good, the lack of reality, but is reality, more precisely positive reality in its negativity.

The positive choice is itself a choice of goodness, and the negative choice is itself a choice of evil.

God is master of his own essence, because in him act and essence, essence and will are one and the same.

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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: Luigi Pareyson (page history), available under CC BY-SA 4.0. Source quality and labels are our own summary of what Wikiquote records.