Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

Best Quotes about Evil

Every sweet has its sour; every evil its good.

Ralph Waldo Emerson

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

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

Buddha

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

Hood, Thomas

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

Auden, W. H.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

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

Gracian, Baltasar

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

Weber, C. J.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

10.

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

11.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

12.

Submit to the present evil, lest a greater one befall you.

Phaedrus

13.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

14.

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

15.

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

Proverb, American

16.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

17.

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.

18.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

19.

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

Mary Renault

20.

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

Bellow, Saul

21.

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

22.

May the forces of evil become confused on the way to your house.-

Carlin, George

23.

No evil shall happen to the just.

Bible

24.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

25.

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

26.

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

Proverb, Ethiopian

27.

We may draw good out of evil; we must not do evil, that good may come.

Chapman, Maria Weston

28.

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

Darwin, Charles R.

29.

He who passively accepts evil is as much involved in it as he who helps to perpetrate it.

King Jr. Martin Luther

30.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

31.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

32.

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

33.

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

34.

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

Aristotle

35.

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

36.

Nothing in the nature around us is evil. This needs to be repeated since one of the human ways of talking oneself into inhuman acts is to cite the supposed cruelty of nature.

Berger, John

37.

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

38.

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

39.

No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency.

Theodore Roosevelt

40.

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

41.

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

Cioran, E. M.

42.

It is a power stronger than will. Could a stone escape from the laws of gravity? Impossible. Impossible, for evil to form an alliance with good.