Motivational Quotes

Evil

Whenever evil befalls us, we ought to ask ourselves, after the first suffering, how we can turn it into good. So shall we take occasion, from one bitter root, to raise perhaps many flowers.

- Leigh Hunt

Best Quotes about Evil

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Lerner, Max

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

Haydon, Benjamin

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

Hesiod

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

James, William

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

When choosing between two evils, I always like to try the one I've never tried before.

West, Mae

If there was no moral evil upon earth, there would be no physical evil.

Maistre, Joseph De

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.

10.

The trouble with Eichmann was precisely that so many were like him, and that the many were neither perverted nor sadistic, that they were, and still are, terribly and terrifyingly normal. From the viewpoint of our legal institutions and of our moral standards of judgment, this normality was much more terrifying than all the atrocities put together.

Arendt, Hannah

11.

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Ovid

12.

Them meaning of good and bad, of better and worse, is simply helping or hurting.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

13.

Some people show evil as a great racehorse shows breeding. They have the dignity of a hard chancre.

Hemingway, Ernest

14.

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

Blaise Pascal

15.

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

Simone Weil

16.

By bravely enduring it, an evil which cannot be avoided is overcome

Proverb

17.

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

18.

The spread of evil is the symptom of a vacuum. whenever evil wins, it is only by default: by the moral failure of those who evade the fact that there can be no compromise on basic principles.

Ayn Rand

19.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

20.

No evil is without its compensation. The less money, the less trouble; the less favor, the less envy. Even in those cases which put us out of wits, it is not the loss itself, but the estimate of the loss that troubles us.

Seneca

21.

We are tainted by modern philosophy which has taught us that all is good, whereas evil has polluted everything and in a very real sense all is evil, since nothing is in its proper place.

Maistre, Joseph De

22.

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

23.

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

Aurelius, Marcus

24.

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

Darwin, Charles R.

25.

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

26.

Evil deeds do not prosper; the slow man catches up with the swift.

Homer

27.

Only among people who think no evil can Evil monstrously flourish.

Smith, Logan Pearsall

28.

Evil spelled backward is live.

29.

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

30.

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

31.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

32.

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

Hood, Thomas

33.

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

Plato

34.

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

King Edward the Third

35.

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

Masters, Brian

36.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

37.

What is worse than evil? The inability to bear it.

Weber, C. J.

38.

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

Aristotle

39.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

40.

No notice is taken of a little evil, but when it increases it strikes the eye.

Aristotle

41.

Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s.

Erasmus, Desiderius

42.

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

43.

Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.

Proverb, Ethiopian

44.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

45.

Of two evils, it is always best to vote for the least hypocritical.

Proverb, American

46.

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

Auden, W. H.

47.

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

Voltaire

48.

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

49.

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

50.

Between two evils, I always pick the one I never tried before.

Mae West