Quotessence
Home / Topics / Good Quotes

Good Quotes

Browse 1752 quotes about Good.

Related topics

IfsInspirationalPeopleGood ThingsLifeEvilFeelsHappensMotivationalPositive AttitudeThinkingWantFunnyReligious

Good Quotes

“In Ireland we hear but little of the darker powers, and come across any who have seen them even more rarely, for the imagination of the people dwells rather upon the fantastic and capricious, and fantasy and caprice would lose the freedom which is their breath of life, were they to unite them either with evil or with good. And yet the wise are of opinion that wherever man is, the dark powers who would feed his rapacities are there too, no less than the bright beings who store their honey in the cells of his heart, and the twilight beings who flit hither and thither, and that they encompass him with a passionate and melancholy multitude. They hold, too, that he who by long desire or through accident of birth possesses the power of piercing into their hidden abode can see them there, those who were once men or women full of a terrible vehemence, and those who have never lived upon the earth, moving slowly and with a subtler malice. The dark powers cling about us, it is said, day and night, like bats upon an old tree; and that we do not hear more of them is merely because the darker kinds of magic have been but little practised. I have indeed come across very few persons in Ireland who try to communicate with evil powers, and the few I have met keep their purpose and practice wholly hidden from those among whom they live.”

EvilGoodDark Powers
Book:The Celtic Twilight (Bridge Bilingual Classics)
Create image

“By definition, a human being is endowed with free will. He can use this to choose between good and evil. If he can only perform good or only perform evil, then he is a clockwork orange - meaning that he has the appearance of an organism lovely with colour and juice but is in fact only a clockwork toy to be wound up by God or the Devil or (since this is increasingly replacing both) the Almighty State. It is as inhuman to be totally good as it is to be totally evil. The important thing is moral choice. Evil has to exist along with good in order that moral choice may operate. Life is sustained by the grinding opposition of moral entities. This is what the television news is all about. Unfortunately there is so much original sin in us all that we find evil rather attractive. To devastate is easier and more spectacular than to create.”

EvilSinMoralityGoodMoralsMoral CompassClockwork Orange
Book:A Clockwork Orange
Create image

“Throughout the world what remains of the vast public spaces are now only the stuff of legends: Robin Hood’s forest, the Great Plains of the Amerindians, the steppes of the nomadic tribes, and so forth… Rousseau said that the first person who wanted a piece of nature as his or her own exclusive possession and transformed it into the transcendent form of private property was the one who invented evil. Good, on the contrary, is what is common.”

EvilCommonGoodPrivate PropertyEmpire
Book:Impero
Create image

“Odd, don't you think? I have seen war, and invasions and riots. I have heard of massacres and brutalities beyond imagining, and I have kept my faith in the power of civilization to bring men back from the brink. And yet one women writes a letter, and my whole world falls to pieces. You see, she is an ordinary woman. A good one, even. That's the point ... Nothing [a recognizably bad person does] can surprise or shock me, or worry me. But she denounced Julia and sent her to her death because she resented her, and because Julia is a Jew. I thought in this simple contrast between the civilized and the barbaric, but I was wrong. It is the civilized who are the truly barbaric, and the [Nazi] Germans are merely the supreme expression of it.”

WarEvilCivilizationGoodResentmentWwiiBarbarismJewsNazisPettinessOrdinarinessDenunciation
Book:The Dream of Scipio
Create image

“The ground for morality can only be prepared when a greater individual or collective-individual, as, for example, society or state, subjects the individuals in it, that is, when it draws them out of their isolatedness and integrates them into a union. Force precedes morality; indeed, for a time morality itself is a force, to which others acquiesce to avoid unpleasere. Later it becomes custom, and still later free obedience and finally almost instinct: then it is coupled to pleasure, like all habitual and natural things, and is now called virtue.”

EvilForcePowerVirtueMoralityEthicsGoodMoralsCustom
Book:Human, All Too Human: A Book for Free Spirits
Create image

“Scratch utters the lines: 'I know there is evil in the world - essential evil, not the opposite good or the defective of good but something to which good itself is an irrelevance - a fantasy. No one can live as long as I have, hear what I have heard and not know that. I know too - more precisely - I am ready to belive that there may be something in the world - someone, if you prefer - that purpose evil, that intends it... powerful nations suddenly, without occasion, without apparent cause... decay. Their children turn against them. Their women lose their sense of being a woman. Their families disintegrate.' From there on it only gets better”

EvilGoodBad
Book:Chronicles, Volume One
Create image

“No doubt your sword is indeed a beautiful thing. It is a tribute to whoever forged it in bygone ages. There are very few such swords as this one left in the world, but remember, it is only a sword, Matthias! It contains no secret spell, nor holds within its blade any magical power. This sword is made for only one purpose, to kill. It will only be as good or evil as the one who wields it. I know that you intend to use it only for the good of your Abbey, Matthias; do so, but never allow yourself to be tempted into using it in a careless or idle way. It would inevitably cost you your life, or that of your dear ones. Martin the Warrior used the sword only for right and good. This is why it has become a symbol of power to Redwall. Knowledge is gained through wisdom, my friend. Use the sword wisely.”

EvilGoodRightSwordWisedom
Book:Redwall
Create image

“Where power is concerned, there’s no judgement, no duality, no left and right, no yin and yang, no ‘good’ vs. ‘evil.’ Universally speaking, all that matters is power, pure and simple. This is why in world mythology the seemingly antithetical archetypes of creation and destruction are often wedded in the same god or goddess.”

EvilPowerfulPowerCreationDestructionGoodMythologyGood And EvilPersonal PowerArchetypes
Book:Get Out of Here Alive: Inner Alchemy & Immortality
Create image

“The intellectual climate of the 1970s, for which the 1950s had already paved the way, contributed to this. A theory was even finally developed at that time that pedophilia should be viewed as something positive. Above all, however, the thesis was advocated-and this even infiltrated Catholic moral theology-that there was no such thing as something that is bad in itself. There were only things that were "relatively" bad. What was good or bad depended on the consequences. In such a context, where everything is relative and nothing intrinsically evil exists, but only relative good and relative evil, people who have an inclination to such behavior are left without no solid footing. Of course pedophilia is first rather a sickness of individuals, but the fact that it could become so active and so widespread was linked also to an intellectual climate through which the foundations of moral theology, good and evil, became open to question in the Church. Good and evil became interchangeable; they were no longer absolutely clear opposites.”

EvilMoralityCatholicGoodTheologyPriestsPedophilia
Book:Light of the World: The Pope, the Church, and the Signs of the Times - A Conversation with Peter Seewald
Create image

“Добро в мире - изначально. Оно родилось вместе со Вселенной. Зло возникло просто как отрицание добра и всего мира. Беда в том, что злу живётся гораздо легче. У него ведь одна цель: уничтожить добро. А у добра целей две: во-первых, творить, строить, созидать мир, а во-вторых, защищать то, что сделано, от зла. Значит, и энергии нужно вдвое. А её у добра и зла, увы, поровну. (Настоятель Пётр (Альбин Ксото) - Корнелию Гласу)”

EvilGood
Book:Выстрел с монитора. Гуси-гуси, га-га-га...
Create image

“To accept passively an unjust system is to coöperate with that system; thereby the oppressed become as evil as the oppressor. Nocoöperation with evil is as much a moral obligation as is coöperation with good. The oppressed must never allow the conscience of the oppressor to slumber. Religion reminds every man that he is his brother's keeper. To accept injustice or segregation passively is to say to the oppressor that his actions are morally right. It is a way of allowing his conscience to fall asleep.”

EvilConscienceInjusticeGoodOppressionCollaborationCooperationOppressedSegregationOppressors
Book:Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story
Create image

“Terrible goddamn place. Some days it's like some bastard nailed a ticket for the bus tour down to fucking Hell to the front of my brain. For every wild everything-depends-on-it first-week-of-being-madly-in-love kiss on a streetcorner, for every beautiful woman stopping to feel the sun on her face and every child dancing in clean rain, there's a kid living in its own shit in a dumpster somewhere while Daddy sells his ass for milk money, tanks breaking down unwanted houses just to stop homeless people squatting there... Time was this place didn't make sense and I could live with it. Either it's changed, or I have. There's all the good things on this ticket, and pure fucking evil too. And all the same, I'm going down with you.”

LifeEvilGoodInequalityCityCyberpunk
Book:Transmetropolitan, Vol. 5: Lonely City
Create image

“I allow that it is easier to touch the body of a saint, or to be magnetised, than to restrain our appetites or govern our passions; but health of body or mind can only be recovered by these means, or we make the Supreme Judge partial and revengeful. Is he a man that he should change, or punish out of resentment? He - the common father, wounds but to heal, says reason, and our irregularities producing certain consequences, we are forcibly shewn the nature of vice; that thus learning to know good from evil, by experience, we may hate one and love the other, in proportion to the wisdom which we attain. The poison contains the antidote; and we either reform our evil habits and cease to sin against our own bodies, to use the forcible language of scripture, or a premature death, the punishment of sin, snaps the thread of life.”

GodEvilChangeSinVirtueGoodConsequencesReformationSmoke And MirrorsPopery
Book:A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
Create image

“Now that I have overcome so much pain and can read my destiny like a map full of errors, when I feel no pity for myself and can review my existence without sentimentality, because I have found relative peace, I only lament the loss of innocence. I miss the idealism of my youth, of the time when there was still a clear dividing line between good and evil for me and I believed that it was possible to always act in accordance with immovable principles.”

EvilPrinciplesYouthGoodInnocenceIdealism
Book:The Infinite Plan
Create image

“First of all, you have heard me talk of Logres. It was the old name for this country, thousands of years ago; in the old days when the struggle between good and evil was more bitter and open than it is now. That struggle goes on all round us all the time, like two armies fighting. And sometimes one of them seems to be winning and sometimes the other, but neither has ever triumphed altogether. Nor ever will," he added softly to himself, "for there is something of each in every man.”

EvilWinningGoodTriumphStrugglesGood Vs Evil
Book:Over Sea, Under Stone
Create image