Motivational Quotes

Evil

The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

- Crowley, Aleister

Best Quotes about Evil

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

Ayn Rand

The evil that we know is best.

Titus Maccius Plautus

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

Voltaire

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

Proverb

Evil spelled backward is live.

Evil is obvious only in retrospect.

Gloria Steinem

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

Overcome evil with good. [St. Paul]]

Bible

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

Phaedrus

10.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

11.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

12.

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

Mary Renault

13.

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

14.

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

Baudelaire, Charles

15.

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

West, Mae

16.

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

17.

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

Bible

18.

There is no bad in good.

Horton, Doug

19.

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

20.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

21.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

22.

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.

23.

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

Claudius

24.

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

Mirabeau, Gabriel Riqueti

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.

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

Theodore Roosevelt

27.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

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.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

30.

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

31.

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

Cioran, E. M.

32.

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

33.

Truly has it been said; that all that is necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.

34.

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

35.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

36.

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

Hood, Thomas

37.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

38.

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

39.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

40.

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

41.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

42.

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

Eliot, George

43.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

44.

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

Buddha

45.

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.

46.

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

Proverb, Ethiopian

47.

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

Bischer

48.

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

Simone Weil

49.

The pious pretence that evil does not exist only makes it vague, enormous and menacing.

Crowley, Aleister

50.

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