Good and Evil Quotes

Shakespeare, Kurt Vonnegut, Eric Hoffer, Cicero and Seneca lead. Tolstoy, in The First Step (1892), says that to be good and lead a good life means to give others more than one takes from them. Eleanor Farjeon, in two books from the early 1920s, makes a better joke of it: it is no use crying over spilt evils, it is better to mop them up laughing.

The line about fighting monsters and gazing into the abyss is credited to Mark Twain and marked misattributed. The notes give a German text and a modern translation, which is the Nietzsche version. The “pass through this world but once” passage, credited to Stephen Grellet, is disputed, and a passage on living for something, credited to Thomas Chalmers, is flagged misattributed.