Motivational Quotes

Evil

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

- Aurelius, Marcus

Best Quotes about Evil

Our greatest evils flow from ourselves.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques

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

West, Mae

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

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

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

Evil brings men together.

Aristotle

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

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

Plato

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

Hesiod

10.

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.

11.

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

Bible

12.

All things may corrupt when minds are prone to evil.

Ovid

13.

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

Eliot, George

14.

Overcome evil with good. [St. Paul]]

Bible

15.

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

Mary Renault

16.

Nature, more of a stepmother than a mother in several ways, has sown a seed of evil in the hearts of mortals, especially in the more thoughtful men, which makes them dissatisfied with their own lot and envious of another s.

Erasmus, Desiderius

17.

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

Carlyle, Thomas

18.

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

Hemingway, Ernest

19.

The end excuses any evil.

Sophocles

20.

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

Hesiod

21.

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

Smith, Logan Pearsall

22.

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

King Jr. Martin Luther

23.

Of two evils, choose neither.

Spurgeon, Charles Haddon

24.

All evils are equal when they are extreme.

Corneille, Pierre

25.

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

26.

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

27.

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

28.

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

Hoffer, Eric

29.

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

Chapman, Maria Weston

30.

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

Haydon, Benjamin

31.

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

Bellow, Saul

32.

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

Aristotle

33.

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

34.

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

Proverb

35.

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

La Rochefoucauld, Francois De

36.

Evil is nourished and grows by concealment.

Virgil

37.

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

38.

There must always remain something that is antagonistic to good.

Plato

39.

Don't let us make imaginary evils, when you know we have so many real ones to encounter.

Oliver Goldsmith

40.

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

Auden, W. H.

41.

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

Proverb, Ethiopian

42.

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

Phaedrus

43.

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

44.

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

45.

Evil be to him who evil thinks.

Edward II

46.

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

Hood, Thomas

47.

Evil draws men together.

Aristotle

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.

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

Weber, C. J.

50.

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

Burroughs, William S.