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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.

Random quote on Good and Evil

Most quoted on good and evil:

They live best, I think, who strive best to become as good as possible: and the pleasantest life is theirs who are conscious that they are growing in goodness.

Xenophon

If goodness leade him not, yet wearinesse
May tosse him to my breast.

George Herbert

When the Will is exercised for the advantage of the lower self, when it is employed for personal ends and aims, then is the man a Black Magician, a danger to the race, and his results obstruct and delay human evolution.

Annie Besant A Study in Consciousness: A contribution to the science of psychology (1904)

Of two evils I have chosen the least.

Matthew Prior

An evil life is a kind of death.

Ovid

Of two evils I have chose the least.

Matthew Prior

It is not so important that many should be good as you, as that there be some absolute goodness somewhere; for that will leaven the whole lump.

Henry David Thoreau

What is good looking, as Horace Smith remarks, but looking good? Be good, be womanly, be gentle,—generous in your sympathies, heedful of the well-being of all around you; and, my word for it, you will not lack kind words of admiration.

John Greenleaf Whittier

Sweet are the uses of adversity,
Which like the toad, ugly and venomous,
Wears yet a precious jewel in his head;
And this our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in every thing.

William Shakespeare

Evil is fittest to consort with evil.

Livy

One evil rises out of another.

Terence

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

here is no evil in the world without a remedy.

Jacopo Sannazaro

What good I see humbly I seek to do,
And live obedient to the law, in trust
That what will come, and must come, shall come well.

Edwin Arnold The Light of Asia (1879)

Look around the habitable world, how few
Know their own good, or knowing it, pursue.

John Dryden

Impell'd with steps unceasing to pursue
Some fleeting good, that mocks me with the view,
That, like the circle bounding earth and skies,
Allures from far, yet, as I follow, flies.

Oliver Goldsmith The Traveller (1764)

I happen to think that the singular evil of our time is prejudice. It is from this evil that all other evils grow and multiply. In almost everything I've written there is a thread of this: a man's seemingly palpable need to dislike someone other than himself.

Rod Serling

Of two evils choose the least.

Erasmus

She has more goodness in her little finger, than he has in his whole body.

Jonathan Swift Polite Conversation (1738)

Have we fallen into a mesmerized state that makes us accept as inevitable that which is inferior or detrimental, as though having lost the will or the vision to demand that which is good?

Rachel Carson Silent Spring (1962)

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