Motivational Quotes

Evil

Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.

- Evelyn Underhill

Best Quotes about Evil

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

There surely is in human nature an inherent propensity to extract all the good out of all the evil.

Haydon, Benjamin

The Supreme end of education is expert discernment in all things -- the power to tell the good from the bad, the genuine from the counterfeit, and to prefer the good and the genuine to the bad and the counterfeit.

Johnson, Samuel

But evil is wrought by want of thought as well as want of heart!

Hood, Thomas

Evil is neither suffering nor sin; it is both at the same time, it is something common to them both. For they are linked together; sin makes us suffer and suffering makes us evil, and this indissoluble complex of suffering and sin is the evil in which we are submerged against our will, and to our horror.

Weil, Simone

This is the very worst wickedness, that we refuse to acknowledge the passionate evil that is in us. This makes us secret and rotten.

Lawrence, D. H.

There is only one good -- knowledge; and only one evil -- ignorance.

Socrates

The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Crowley, Aleister

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

10.

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

11.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

12.

Must I do all the evil I can before I learn to shun it? Is it not enough to know the evil to shun it? If not, we should be sincere enough to admit that we love evil too well to give it up.

Gandhi, Mahatma

13.

There has to be evil so that good can prove its purity above it.

Buddha

14.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

15.

Truly has it been said; that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

16.

So far as we are human, what we do must be either evil or good: so far as we do evil or good, we are human: and it is better, in a paradoxical way, to do evil than to do nothing: at least we exist.

Eliot, T. S.

17.

I know indeed what evil I intend to do, but stronger than all my afterthoughts is my fury, fury that brings upon mortals the greatest evils.

Euripides

18.

Life is neither good or evil, but only a place for good and evil.

Aurelius, Marcus

19.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

20.

There is no bad in good.

Horton, Doug

21.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

22.

What wisdom can there be to choose, what continence to forbear without the knowledge of evil? He that can apprehend and consider vice with all her baits and seeming pleasures, and yet abstain, and yet distinguish, and yet prefer that which is truly better, he is the true wayfaring Christian.

Milton, John

23.

Nothing baffles the schemes of evil people so much as the calm composure of great souls.

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

24.

As long as people believe in absurdities they will continue to commit atrocities.

Voltaire

25.

We must as second best...take the least of the evils.

Aristotle

26.

I couldn't claim that I have never felt the urge to explore evil, but when you descend into hell you have to be very careful.

Raine, Kathleen

27.

There are evils that have the ability to survive identification and go on for ever... money, for instance, or war.

Bellow, Saul

28.

All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.

Edmund Burke

29.

There can be no existence of evil as a force to the healthy-minded individual.

James, William

30.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, than humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

Curie, Madame Marie

31.

There is hardly a man clever enough to recognize the full extent of the evil he does.

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

Non-cooperation with evil is as much a duty as is cooperation with good.

Gandhi, Mahatma

33.

Evil, and evil spirits, devils and devil possession, are the outgrowth of man's inadequate consciousness of God. We must avoid thinking of evil as a thing in itself-a force that works against man or, against God, if you will.

Butterworth, Eric

34.

Evil is done without effort, naturally, it is the working of fate; good is always the product of an art.

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

It is a cursed evil to any man to become as absorbed in any subject as I am in mine.

Darwin, Charles R.

36.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

37.

Evil is unspectacular and always human, and shares our bed and eats at our own table.

Auden, W. H.

38.

Evil is something you recognize immediately you see it: it works through charm.

Masters, Brian

39.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

40.

He harms himself who does harm to another, and the evil plan is most harmful to the planner.

Hesiod

41.

There is no explanation for evil. It must be looked upon as a necessary part of the order of the universe. To ignore it is childish, to bewail it senseless.

Maugham, W. Somerset

42.

Evil is a moral entity and not a created one, an eternal and not a perishable entity: it existed before the world; it constituted the monstrous, the execrable being who was also to fashion such a hideous world. It will hence exist after the creatures which people this world.

Sade, Marquis De

43.

Evil to him who evil thinks. (Honi Soit Qui Mal Pense)

King Edward the Third

44.

My mother's obsession with the good scissors always scared me a bit. It implied that somewhere in the house there lurked: the evil scissors.

Martin, Tony

45.

No evil can happen to a good man, either in life or after death.

Plato

46.

Evil spelled backward is live.

47.

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Oliver Goldsmith

48.

Before man is life and death, good and evil; that which he shall choose shall be given him. [Ecclesiasticus]

Bible

49.

Evil when we are in its power is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.

Simone Weil

50.

The surest defense against Evil is extreme individualism, originality of thinking, whimsicality, even -- if you will -- eccentricity. That is, something that can't be feigned, faked, imitated; something even a seasoned imposter couldn't be happy with.

Brodsky, Joseph