Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

Best Quotes about Evil

1.

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

Crowley, Aleister

2.

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

Socrates

3.

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

Voltaire

4.

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

5.

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

Hood, Thomas

6.

Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.

Blaise Pascal

7.

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

8.

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

Cioran, E. M.

9.

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

Bible

10.

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

Claudius

11.

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

12.

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

Haydon, Benjamin

13.

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

Hesiod

14.

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

Weber, C. J.

15.

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

Hesiod

16.

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

Hoffer, Eric

17.

I am one of those who think like Nobel, than humanity will draw more good than evil from new discoveries.

Curie, Madame Marie

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.

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

20.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

21.

Evil spelled backward is live.

22.

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

Emerson, Ralph Waldo

23.

Wicked is not much worse than indiscreet.

Donne, John

24.

When you choose the lesser of two evils, always remember that it is still an evil.

Lerner, Max

25.

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.

26.

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

27.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

28.

They that know no evil will suspect none.

Jonson, Ben

29.

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

30.

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

31.

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

Mary Renault

32.

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

Wollstonecraft, Mary

33.

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

Plato

34.

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

Edmund Burke

35.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

36.

The love of evil is the root of all money.

Proverb, American

37.

Of two evils we must always choose the least.

Thomas a Kempis

38.

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

Ayn Rand

39.

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

40.

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

41.

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

42.

The face of evil is always the face of total need.

Burroughs, William S.

43.

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

Aristotle

44.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

45.

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

Gracian, Baltasar

46.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

47.

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

Phaedrus

48.

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.

49.

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

Aristotle

50.

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