Great Throughts Treasury

"The true doctrine of omnipresence is that God reappears with all his parts in every moss and cobweb. The value of the universe contrives to throw itself into every point. If the good is there, so is the evil; if the affinity, so the repulsion; if the force, so the limitation. Thus is the universe alive. All things are moral. That soul which within us is a sentiment, outside of us is a law. We feel its inspiration; out there in history we can see its fatal strength. "It is in the world, and the world was made by it." Justice is not postponed. A perfect equity adjusts its balance in all parts of life. The dice of God are always loaded." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"The first lesson of history is the good of evil." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Every evil to which we do not succumb is a benefactor." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

"Law cannot restrain evil; for the freedom of man is such that he can make the keeping of the law the instrument of evil." -

"The fragmentary character of human life is not regarded as evil in Biblical faith because it is seen from the perspective of a center of life and meaning in which each fragment is related to the plan of the whole, to the will of God. The evil arises when the fragment seeks by its own wisdom to comprehend the whole or attempts by its own power to realize it." -

"The passion of desire is an agitation of the soul caused by the spirits which dispose it to wish for the future the things which it represents to itself as agreeable. Thus we do not only desire the presence of the absent good, but also the conservation of the present, and further, the absence of evil, both of that which we already have, and of that which we believe we might experience in time to come." - René Descartes

"Pity is a species of sadness, mingled with love or good-will towards those whom we see suffering some evil of which we consider them undeserving." - René Descartes

"What is objectionable, what is dangerous about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents." - Robert Kennedy, fully Robert Francis "Bobby" Kennedy

"Life eternal is the supreme good, death eternal the supreme evil." -

"As to worldly riches, if you do not possess them, let them not be sought after on earth by doing evil; and if you possess them, let them by good works be paid up in heaven." -

"The precept “Resist not evil,” was given to prevent us from taking pleasure in revenge, in which the mind is gratified by the sufferings of others, but not to make us neglect the duty of restraining men from sin." -

"What could begin this evil but pride, that is the beginning of all sin? And what is pride but a perverse desire of height, in forsaking Him to whom the soul ought solely to cleave, as the beginning thereof, to make the self seem the beginning." -

"Free will was granted to humanity. Man became conscious of good and evil, and his power of free choice. He acquired simultaneously Freedom and Responsibility. Henceforth he could help or he could hinder." - Oliver Lodge, fully Sir Oliver Joseph Lodge

"There is no man suddenly either extremely good or extremely evil." - Philip Sidney, fully Sir Philip Sidney

"Forcible ways make not an end of evil, but leave hatred and malice behind them." -

"The only good is knowledge and the only evil is ignorance." - Socrates NULL

"False words are not only evil in themselves, but they infect the soul with evil." - Socrates NULL

"There is only one good, that is, knowledge; and only one evil, that is, ignorance." - Socrates NULL

"To do… injustice to another is a far greater evil for the doer of the injustice than it is for the victim." - Socrates NULL

"There never is any duality. The principle of awareness, Atman, never engages in any activity, although from this pure principle alone, the luminous, transparent, insubstantial universe spontaneously unfolds. When the practitioner is consciously identified, not with any expression of awareness but with the living principle of awareness... there remains no sense of intrinsic involvement with polarities such as good and evil, virtue and vice, self and other, existence and nonexistence. However, when one identifies with activity rather than with principle, manifesting an ego that claims to generate various chains of events, then the tensions between polar opposites split that person’s consciousness, creating various forms of obvious and subtle suffering." -

"The perception of Good and Evil - whatever choice we may make - is the first requisite of spiritual life." - T. S. Eliot, fully Thomas Sterns Eliot

"What is man and what use is he? What do his good or evil deeds signify? His span of life is at most a hundred years; compared with endless time, his few years are like one drop of sea-water or a single grain of sand. That is why the Lord is patient with them, lavishing his mercy upon them." -

"Of eight things a little is good and much is evil: travel, mating, wealth, work, wine, sleep, spiced drinks, medicine." - Talmud or The Talmud NULL

"No man is justified in doing evil on the ground of expediency." - Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt

"Fanaticism is idolatry; and it has the moral evil of idolatry in it; that is, a fanatic worships something which is the creation of his own desire, and thus even his self-devotion in support of it is only an apparent or his mind, which he least values, offer sacrifice to that which he most values." - Thomas Arnold

"Foolish men imagine that because judgment for an evil thing is delayed, there is no justice; but only accident here below. Judgment for an evil thing is many times delayed some day or two, some century or two, but it is sure as life, it is sure as death." - Thomas Carlyle

"Men’s hearts ought not to be set against one another, but set with one another, and all against the evil thing only." - Thomas Carlyle

"Debt is an evil conscience." - Thomas Fuller

"Evil must never be fought with rage or hatred, for that will only make it stronger. You must never fear the evil ones, for your fear will consume and destroy you. Instead, fight the evil spirits with love and compassion, for those are our greatest weapons." - Tom Brown, Jr.

"To wish the greatness of our own country is often to wish evil to our neighbors. He who could bring himself to wish that his country should always remain as it is, would be a citizen of the universe." - Voltaire, pen name of François-Marie Arouet NULL

"What better way is there to make men love one another than to make men understand one another. True charity comes only with clarity - just as "mercy" is but justice that understands. Surely the root of all evil is the inability to see clearly that which is." - Will Durant, fully William James "Will" Durant

"Death is the greatest evil, because it cuts off hope." - William Hazlitt

"Love and pity and wish well to every soul in the world; hat nothing but the evil that stirs in your own heart." - William Law

"The evil that men do lives after them; the good is oft interred with their bones." - William Shakespeare

"The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose. An evil soul, producing holy witness, is like a villain with a smiling cheek, a goodly apple, rotten at the heart." - William Shakespeare

"Good is that which makes for unity; Evil is that which makes for separateness." - Aldous Leonard Huxley

"Nature, in her indifference, makes no distinction between good and evil." - Anatole France, pen name of Jacques Anatole Francois Thibault

"If a man has beheld evil, he may know that it was shown to him in order that he learn his own guilt and repent; for what is shown to him is also within him." - Baal Shem Tov, given name Yisroel ben Eliezer

"The ideally virtuous man, if we had got rid of asceticism, would be the man who permits the enjoyment of all good things whenever there is no evil consequence to outweigh the enjoyment. " - Bertrand Russell, fully Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell

"Do not speak evil of the dead." - Chilon of Lacedemon NULL

"Every violent reform deserves censure, for it quite fails to remedy evil while men remain what they are, and also because wisdom needs no violence." -

"Whether happiness or unhappiness, freedom or slavery, in short whether good or evil results from an improved environment depends largely upon how the change has been brought about, upon the methods by which the physical results have been reached, and in what spirit and for what purpose the fruits of that change are used. Because a higher standard of living, a greater productiveness and a command over nature are not good in and of themselves do not mean that we cannot make good of them, that they cannot be a source of inner strength." - David Eli Lilienthal, "Mr. TVA"

"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" - Marquis de Sade, born Donatien Alphonse François de Sade

"While time lasts there will always be a future, and that future will hold both good and evil, since the world is made to that mingled pattern. " - Dorothy Leigh Sayers

"Every individual Jew, righteous or wicked, has two souls... One soul derives from kelipah (the "husks" of creation) and sitra achra (the "other side"), and clothes itself in the blood to animate the body... From it derive the evil traits... and also the Jew's instinctive good traits... The second soul in the Jew is literally a "part of G‑d above."" - Shneur Zalman of Liadi

"There are two types of pleasure before G‑d. The first is from the complete nullification of evil and its transformation from bitterness to sweetness and from darkness to light by the perfectly righteous. The second [pleasure] is when evil is repelled while it is still at its strongest and mightiest... through the efforts of the "intermediate man" (beinoni)... As in the analogy of physical food, in which there are two types of delicacies that give pleasure: the first being the pleasure derived from sweet and pleasant foods; and the second, from sharp and sour foods, which are spiced and prepared in such a way that they become delicacies that revive the soul." - Shneur Zalman of Liadi

"Our sages have taught, "Whoever gets angry, it is as if he worshipped idols" (Zohar I, 27b). The reason for this is... because at the time of his anger, his faith has left him. For were he to believe that what happened to him was G d’s doing, he would not be angry at all. For although it is a person possessed of free choice that is cursing him, or striking him, or causing damage to his property -- and is accountable according to the laws of man and the laws of heaven for his evil choice -- nevertheless, as regards the person harmed, this [incident] was already decreed in heaven and “G d has many agents” [to carry out the decree]." - Shneur Zalman of Liadi

"Such a weapon goes far beyond any military objective and enters the range of very great natural catastrophes. By its very nature it cannot be confined to a military objective but becomes a weapon which in practical effect is almost one of genocide. It is clear that the use of such a weapon cannot be justified on any ethical ground which gives a human being a certain individuality and dignity even if he happens to be a resident of an enemy country... The fact that no limits exist to the destructiveness of this weapon makes its very existence and the knowledge of its construction a danger to humanity as a whole. It is necessarily an evil thing considered in any light." - Enrico Fermi

"There is nothing good or evil save in the will." - Epictetus "the Stoic" NULL

"If God listened to the prayers of men, all men would quickly have perished: for they are forever praying for evil against one another. " - Epicurus NULL