Skip to content

Evil springs up, and flowers, and bears no seed,
And feeds the green earth with its swift decay,
Leaving it richer for the growth of truth.

— James Russell Lowell

Another quote →

Topics

Good and Evil

More quotes by James Russell Lowell

Who speaks the truth stabs Falsehood to the heart.

Poems (1844)

It is by presence of mind in untried emergencies that the native metal of a man is tested.

Abraham Lincoln (1864)

Endurance is the crowning quality,
And patience all the passion of great hearts.

Poems: Second Series (1848)

What a sense of security in an old book which Time has criticised for us!

My Study Windows (1871)

One day with life and heart
Is more than time enough to find a world.

Poems: Second Series (1848)

All James Russell Lowell quotes →

You may also like

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