Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

Best Quotes about Evil

The evil of the world is made possible by nothing but the sanction you give it.

Ayn Rand

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

It is bitter to lose a friend to evil, before one loses him to death.

Mary Renault

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

Hesiod

Never open the door to a lesser evil, for other ones invariably slink in after it.

Gracian, Baltasar

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

Auden, W. H.

Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing is more difficult than to understand him.

Fyodor Dostoevsky

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

Socrates

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

10.

Man must vanquish himself, must do himself violence, in order to perform the slightest action untainted by evil.

Cioran, E. M.

11.

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

12.

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

13.

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

14.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

15.

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

Homer

16.

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

Aristotle

17.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

18.

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

19.

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

King Edward the Third

20.

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

Masters, Brian

21.

No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness.

Wollstonecraft, Mary

22.

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

Plato

23.

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

Proverb, Ethiopian

24.

To do no evil is good, to intend none better.

Claudius

25.

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

Buddha

26.

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

27.

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

Haydon, Benjamin

28.

All evil is like a nightmare; the instant you stir under it, the evil is gone.

Carlyle, Thomas

29.

To rid ourselves of our shadows -- who we are -- we must step into either total light or total darkness. Goodness and evil.

Johnson, Jeremy P.

30.

Those that are evil have not only the good against them, but also the bad.

Bischer

31.

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

Proverb

32.

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

33.

Often an entire city has suffered because of an evil man.

Hesiod

34.

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

35.

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

36.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

37.

But what is the greatest evil? If you are going to epitomize evil, what is it? Is it the bomb? The greatest evil that one has to fight constantly, every minute of the day until one dies, is the worse part of oneself.

Mcgoohan, Patrick

38.

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

Edmund Burke

39.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

40.

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

41.

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

Darwin, Charles R.

42.

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

43.

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

44.

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

45.

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

Voltaire

46.

It is by its promise of a sense of power that evil often attracts the weak.

Hoffer, Eric

47.

There is no bad in good.

Horton, Doug

48.

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

Hood, Thomas

49.

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.

50.

No evil shall happen to the just.

Bible