Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

- Simone Weil

Best Quotes about Evil

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

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

Bellow, Saul

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

Bischer

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

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

Hoffer, Eric

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

Hesiod

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

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

Darwin, Charles R.

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

Gandhi, Mahatma

10.

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

Fyodor Dostoevsky

11.

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

12.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

13.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

14.

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

Masters, Brian

15.

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

Bible

16.

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

17.

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

18.

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.

19.

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

Mary Renault

20.

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

Aurelius, Marcus

21.

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

Chapman, Maria Weston

22.

The greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing the world he doesn't exist

Baudelaire, Charles

23.

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

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

24.

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

Aristotle

25.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

26.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

27.

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

28.

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

29.

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

Ayn Rand

30.

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

Mae West

31.

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

32.

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

Bible

33.

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

34.

Do not seek evil gains; evil gains are the equivalent of disaster.

Hesiod

35.

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.

36.

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

37.

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.

38.

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

39.

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

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

Lautreamont, Isidore Ducasse, Comte De

42.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

43.

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Ovid

44.

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

Socrates

45.

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

Plato

46.

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

Phaedrus

47.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

48.

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

49.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

50.

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

Homer