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It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that lies in others.

— Maurice Maeterlinck Wisdom and Destiny (1898)

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Good and Evil

More quotes by Maurice Maeterlinck

I know that you are looking for the Blue Bird, that is to say, the great secret of things and of happiness, so that Man may make our servitude still harder.

The Blue Bird (1908)

An act of goodness is of itself an act of happiness. No reward coming after the event can compare with the sweet reward that went with it.

The New Dictionary of Thoughts: A Cyclopedia of Quotations (1960)

Men's weaknesses are often necessary to the purposes of life.

The future is a world limited by ourselves; in it we discover only what concerns us and, sometimes, by chance, what interests those whom we love the most.

Each progressive spirit is opposed by a thousand mediocre minds appointed to guard the past.

Optimum Sports Nutrition (1993)

All Maurice Maeterlinck quotes →

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