Of what use to destroy the children of evil? It is evil itself we must destroy at the roots.
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.
Most quoted on good and evil:
It is the evil that lies in ourselves that is ever least tolerant of the evil that lies in others.
Good can be done by the bad — but the good alone can be good.
All other knowledge is hurtful to him who has not the science of goodness.
He that does good for good's sake seeks neither praise nor reward, though sure of both at last.
Great hearts alone understand how much glory there is in being good.
How far that little candle throws his beams!
So shines a good deed in a naughty world.
Every evil in the bud is easily crushed: as it grows older, it becomes stronger.
The very curse of an evil deed is that it must always continue to engender evil.
This is a proof of a well-trained mind, to rejoice in what is good and to grieve at the opposite.