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

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

Hesiod

Whoever rewards evil for good, evil will not depart from their house.

Bible

One soweth and another reapeth is a verity that applies to evil as well as good.

Eliot, George

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

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

Carlyle, Thomas

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

Gracian, Baltasar

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

10.

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

Buddha

11.

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

12.

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

13.

I have discovered that all human evil comes from this, man's being unable to sit still and quiet in a room alone.

Pascal, Blaise

14.

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

Proverb, Ethiopian

15.

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

Auden, W. H.

16.

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

Hesiod

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

Proverb, American

20.

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

Theodore Roosevelt

21.

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

Hood, Thomas

22.

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

23.

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

Edmund Burke

24.

Evil spelled backward is live.

25.

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

Cioran, E. M.

26.

Evil comes at leisure like the disease. Good comes in a hurry like the doctor.

Chesterton, Gilbert K.

27.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

28.

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

29.

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

Proverb

30.

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

Chapman, Maria Weston

31.

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

James, William

32.

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.

33.

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

34.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

35.

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

36.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

37.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

38.

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

39.

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

Claudius

40.

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

Aurelius, Marcus

41.

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

Bible

42.

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

King Edward the Third

43.

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

West, Mae

44.

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

Bischer

45.

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

Masters, Brian

46.

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

Mae West

47.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

48.

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

49.

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

50.

All histories do show, and wise politicians do hold it necessary that, for the well-governing of every Commonweal, it behoveth man to presuppose that all men are evil, and will declare themselves so to be when occasion is offered.

Raleigh, Sir Walter